


What We Make

by DiazTuna



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, F/F, Slow Burn, Swan-Mills Family, Terminator AU, Time Travel, because what else it would be, heavy use of Spanglish sorry if that's not your thing, ish? I guess, nothing like killer robots from the future to boost your morale, sci fi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:42:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10434930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiazTuna/pseuds/DiazTuna
Summary: “My mother.” He says calmly. He’d known all along, she’s aware. But he’d known that today would be the day that would get this going. She wants to ask what it was like, to have woken up this morning, laced up his boots and walked into hell just knowing. “It’s programmed the cyborg to kill her. Before I have a chance to be born.”-In which the leader of the future sends his best soldier back to the past to save his mother from a killer cyborg. Terminator AU.





	1. E1

**Author's Note:**

> There's no previous knowledge of Terminator required to understand the AU. If you do by any chance decide to give it a try, watch the first two movies and the TV show. We do not speak of the other two. I'll try my best to update weekly. 
> 
> I thought I'd wait to publish this but in light of recent events, I am not going to wait. So here's to Swen, to QWOC, and most especially to Latinas who don't often get to see themselves in the characters they love. If they won't give it to us, then we'll take it.

Really, she didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Coming in here, beaten to a pulp and out of breath. She’s with three others, not everyone who left their bunker today made it. She knows that, she knows how lucky she is. How lucky she is to see this, the end of the war. Of this life that had been all she’d ever known. She hadn’t expected this place to be so...whatever it is. Straight lines and metal. Metal as far as the eye can see. If she thought machines could feel anything she would call it sentimental. It’s not like the world outside, the piles and piles of junk that managed to survive the end of the world. It’s quiet except for the hum of the machines that do nothing but process data and give out orders in ones and zeroes. She’s glad they’re going to burn it all down. There’ll be nothing left of this place. They’ll win when it’s just fire.

 

“Shit. Puta!” Stein says with her hand caught in her hair. She’s looking at the green numbers running over and over again in the main screen.

 

“What? Qué pasó?” She asks holding her weapon tighter against her chest.

 

“The machines, they’ve..they’ve...” Her fingers are fast on a keyboard, left over from the days when she was a high ranking slave at the butchery. “Sent one of them back to the past, to..”

 

“ Los Angeles.1984.” Their leader replies, his voice low and eyes soft. She has to wonder how he’s kept that, how is it that he can blast sentinels and still look like that.

 

“Yes. How did you know that?” Stein asks, confused. To her it looks like they’ve already lost. Again. “It has a target.” She says without waiting for a reply.

 

“My mother.” He says calmly. He’d known all along, she’s aware. But he’d known that today would be the day that would get this going. She wants to ask what it was like, to have woken up this morning, laced up his boots and walked into hell just _knowing._ “It’s programmed the cyborg to kill her. Before I have a chance to be born.”

 

She knows all about his mother. She doesn’t why he’d picked her out of everyone to share his stories. How she’d wiped his tears while telling him to dust himself off. How she taught him a game before anything else, of the mountains and the green he grew up in. She can’t even begin to imagine what that must have looked like. To have a mother with steady hands and voz firme. Who he thinks had forgotten how to smile most days but when she did it was blinding. He’d shown her an old photograph of her, given her name. She was so young, behind the wheel of a car. Eyes searching for something. Sad, that’s what she looked like. She’ll never understand how is it she’d kept her image in her mind. Or why it matters so much to her.

 

“So if the cyborg succeeds you won’t exist?” Hernández asks him. “This moment won’t exist? Todo...”

 

“That’s one theory. Not a risk worth taking.” He says still so calm, his fingers tracing the edges of a machine. “Stein, think you can send someone back using this?” And just like that his voice changes, like it had come back to the present. Full of authority, maybe learned from his mother.

 

“Yeah, think so. It’ll take a few minutes to get it running.” Stein clears her throat. “Needs to power up again.”

 

“Who volunteers?” He asks them all with something she can’t place in his eyes. “Before anyone answers, you have to know that no one…” His voice breaks a little as he looks at her. She can’t understand why. “No one comes home.”

 

She considers it as she hears the machines get louder and louder as they boot up. And what would she be leaving behind, exactly? She can’t think of anything that would keep her here. Not if there is something to fight for in the past, something that could save everyone. Bring back everything they’ve lost. Everything she had grown up without knowing, things she’s only heard in stories.

 

“I’ll do it. I’ll go.” She says before anyone else has a chance.

 

He nods at her, suddenly looking so much younger. Younger than her. “You’ll need to find my mother. Protect her. She’ll be...No te va a creer. Not at first. I need you to give her a message for me.”

 

He pulls her in close like he’s never done before and whispers the words so that only she can hear. They're simple enough to confuse her.

 

“Just like that?” She asks, not sure that it will be enough.

 

“Yes, just like that. Trust me.”

 

“I do.” She says needing to ask more questions but not having the time.

 

“It’s ready.” Stein says quietly.

 

Henry Mills squeezes her arm before he lets her go. She looks up at the machine, a platform with two large metal pillars. Hernández pats her back she walks up to it.

 

“The machine doesn’t take inorganic material,” Stein eyes her carefully. “The t-800 went naked, you’re gonna have to.”

 

She shakes her head as begins undressing. Tosses her weapon to Hernández, her clothes and bandages at Stein. Her skin turns hard with the cold of the room. The hairs at the back of her neck are all on edge. Henry Mills keeps his eyes in hers. Her feet begin to leave the the platform.

 

“Suerte, Emma.” He tells her and he doesn’t look too much like a fighter right now. “You’re saving us all.”

 

Emma can only nod, Henry Mills never looks away from her. It's like he's making sure he's the last thing she sees. There is the sound gears turning and of the machines thinking as she’s up in the air. And then she feels like she’s being torn apart. She sees ruins become tall buildings, things she’d never known. Strange, strange things. Green growing, lights, so many lights. People, coming, going. Not fighting, not running. Emma wants to reach out to them, touch them. See if they’re as real as she is. When she’s trying to stretch out her arm she’s being put back together and falling on her bare knees. Fuck.

* * *

 

 

It’s night in the past. The air is lighter, it isn’t pressing down on her.  She doesn't know how else to describe it. The past is cooler too. Emma shivers, so used to burning heat and dust storms. So different from what she felt just minutes ago, somewhere in the future. Her past. Her head is about to explode and her eyes feel like they’re sinking into her skull. Her vision is still blurred. She’s had worse days. Or she will. The fucking banging in her head gets worse. Emma’s legs are stronger than she’d expected so she stands up and decides to start walking in any direction. Her bare feet are hard enough to carry her on the concrete. She’s naked, Emma remembers. She knows the t-800 isn’t naked anymore, it's programming tells it to blend no matter what. It probably stole the clothes off the first humans it found.  Killed for them, without a second thought.  Emma has too many of them right now, thoughts reminding her of battle, of those she has to save. Loud, screaming thoughts about time travel and Henry Mills’s mother. But she manages to quiet those down, just for now. Forces them to become three simple ones. Clothes, weapons, food.

 

She looks up and sees a metal ladder leading up to a window and it’s hitting her how much she doesn't know about this time.  Her bones ache as she reaches for it and climbs. Emma presses her hand against the window feeling the cool...cool...glass underneath her fingertips and wonders how it would sound if she broke it. She’s curious for a second too long and has to ask herself if this is how things are going to be for here on. If she’ll stop at every little thing that doesn’t exist in her time, if she’ll spend the rest of her life gasping. Emma settles for trying to pull it open and is satisfied when it budges.

 

It’s a large room, just as quiet as the factory had been. Rows and rows of things. It looks like an armory at first glance but then her eyes adjust and Emma doesn’t know what the hell this place is. With so much up for grabs, enough to keep the entire resistance safe from the Sun and fumes. She runs to find the first clothes that’ll fit her, something to bind her chest with and big enough shoes. Everything on her skin feels so soft, not scratchy like the stitched up leftovers. There’s a red jacket she takes for herself because she just likes the way it looks, the way it makes her feel. Maybe if this time had been hers this would’ve been her favorite. Except this time is all she has left, Emma supposes. _No one comes home._ She’s here and the only who can stop that machine. Lucky this place that isn’t an armory, has weapons. Testing their hold Emma wants her own back, they felt lighter on her hands and didn’t need heavy cartridges. But she takes the ones that’ll slow down a t-800. Big, bulky bullets that’d blast any human away. They go into a bag she can carry on her shoulders.

 

This place  has sealed food that doesn’t smell like anything she knows. Water is clear and bottled, and she guesses and remembers that it doesn’t need to be boiled. Emma takes as many of them as she can, until the bag sags against her shoulders. It feels good, like this is part of a plan. At least she knows better than to attempt to leave through the door and climbs out the window. Her steps are stronger on the ground and she reminds herself that they need to be if she wants to keep going. Emma steps out from the alley and holds in a breath because she can't take it. Shit, she can't take it. The colors of the past are bright reds, yellow and blues. The lights hurt her eyes and she struggles to see. Ruido, ruido, too much of it. Too many voices, sounds she wants to just stop. Music, music if that's the word. Emma fights the urge to fall to her knees and cry. But she’s a soldier, on her feet, on her feet.

 

Her hands ball into fists and she shakes her head trying to clear it from _everything_. The machine doesn’t have this problem, it only sees numbers. It takes in its surroundings for analysis and does whatever it’s programmed to do. It’s easier. What would the resistance think of her right now? Jealous of a machine. She’s already at a disadvantage. All Emma has is her brains and Henry Mills’s stories to guide her. So she tries to think how it would think, what she’d do if she wanted someone dead in the past. If she just had a name, no face, just a time and place. Records, the sort of thing anyone could access. From what Henry Mills told her this time made tracking down difficult. A person could disappear if they wanted to, a system made of paper and a few numbers that pinned them down. Things that tied a person to a place, back when people still called something theirs.

 

“Ronnie come on, come on. Don’t be like that!” A man yells into a piece of plastic on the street. He balances it on his ear as he searches his pockets. “Listen, it’s  telling me I need ‘nother quarter. No, don’t you hang up on me! Ronnie!” He slams the thing against a metal plate and walks off into the lights and the noise.

 

 _“To them the machine was man looking up a name at a payphone. How could have anyone known?”_ Henry Mills had told her sounding like he’d wished so hard for it to have never happened. The memory hits her like those dry nightwinds that used to hurt her face.

 

She rushes over to where the man had been standing and finds a... _phonebook_. Something that would have burned when the world ended. Been used to feed their fires if it had survived. It’s what the machine would do. It’s done it already. It’s too easy and that’s what so fucking scary.  Emma’s index finger finds her, or all three of them. Regina Mills. There are numbers and words next to her names. She only hopes that the Regina Mills she came back for, that the Regina Mills with the dark hair and eyes that already know too much, is last on this list. At  least Emma has that over the machine, the memory of her face. With that, Emma rips the page and stashes it into her pocket. It’s all she can do to keep her safe for now.

 

**A few notes (that I don't want repeated in every chapter. One day I'll figure that out):**

  * James Cameron decided to feature Spanglish in the second Terminator movie. John and Sarah Connor canonically speak Spanish,  John was even born in Nicaragua during the civil war. Cameron appropriated Spanglish and Spanish, white washed it. I'm reclaiming it. Latinx people deserve to be at the center of narratives. 
  * The Spanish/Spanglish used by everyone but Regina is conjugated in the informal "vos" (you) used in many countries of Latin America, the slang and its particular conjugation belong to Central American countries. Any different accentuation and spelling is just that conjugation. Regina doesn't use "vos" but "tú" (may occasionally switch to usted) to match the headcanon that non magic AU Regina is always Puerto Rican. Language has a history and vos became an out-of-fashion form of speaking in Spain and only some colonies (notably New Spain, aka Mexico) adapted to it. Most often they were bigger, richer. This is just me being proud of the way we speak in the face of many calling it inappropriate or vulgar (Still living the nasty shades of Spanish colonialism). Especially during a time of increased xenophobia against Central Americans everywhere. 
  * The use of Spanglish will only grow from here. It's how many people speak and yeah, it's the language of the future. Some English words will be a little off or wonky too on account of future speak.
  * Emma is still white as in canon, she was just raised speaking Spanglish.  
  * "Puta" in this case doesn't translate to whore, it's an interjection that most closely relates "fuck!". Rest assured I will never use it as an insult. 
  * This chapter is a little shorter and different than the others because of the way the beginning needed to play out. 




	2. R1

The professor’s voice is droning on and on, it sounds like he is miles away instead of standing at the bottom of a lecture hall. Regina hasn’t quite decided what to make of his words, she’s filling her notes with question marks and points to revise in an essay later. Something about this particular lesson is making her uneasy, and it’s not just the heat and the sweat of the afternoon.

 

“So it’s a question we have to ask ourselves. Do we believe man’s nature to be good or do we believe him to be evil?” He says with the air of someone who thought of the words years ago and is just stuck in a mindless loop. “Do we make laws and contracts based on restriction of his bad nature or do we build our society based on his cooperation?”

 

_That_ is what is giving her a stomach ache. He sounds so bored with the idea, like these things just exist in this lecture hall, in theory. Like these are things people can’t help but being, as if anyone could be one or the other. Regina looks at him, with his pressed and buttoned shirt, and thinks he doesn’t know what she knows. Trimmed beard, blue eyes and the grey in his hair. No, he doesn’t know that much at all. The only good thing about today it’s that it’s Friday and she can already see Marian mouthing to her from three rows down.

 

“Meet after?” Is all Regina can make out as she nods.

 

Regina checks her watch. Five more minutes, she can make it through another five minutes of bad philosophy. She rubs her temples and lets the Sun hit her, it’s not like she sees a lot of it these days. So much for sunny California.  Her eyes water as she fights off a yawn. She’s not allowed to be tired. There is a lot work that has to be done, work she is looking forward to, Regina reminds herself. She would rather not think about why she needs a reminders.

 

“...and with that I leave you to reflect over your readings.”  The professor says closing a briefcase Regina is positive is empty.

 

Marian jumps to wrap an arm around her shoulders as soon as she’s out of the lecture hall. She’s stopped flinching and actually welcomes Marian’s loose grip around her.  

 

“You were late.” Regina reprimands as they head out.

 

“And you didn’t save me seat!” She says in mock hurt. “Could have used the distraction.”

 

“He really was....”

 

“Shit today?”

 

“Thought I’d died at one point.”

 

Marian laughs though Regina doesn’t think she’s said anything funny. She freezes when Marian kisses her cheek, like she’s earned something she hasn’t figured out yet. And for a second, and that’s how long it usually lasts, she feels envy at how easy these things come to Marian.

 

“What was that for?” Regina asks looking ahead to avoid her friend's eyes.

 

“I’ve got something to show you,” She untangles herself from Regina and searches her bag. “Here. It’s about you. Well, kind of.”

 

Marian hands her a newspaper folded in half and with a small article circled in red. Regina thinks her heart skips as her feet come to a halt.

 

_EXECUTION IN PLAYA DEL REY. Mrs. Regina Mills (38) was found dead in her Playa del Rey home by her husband late last night. Police determined that she was killed instantly by a gunshot to the head. There are currently no suspects and an investigation is ongoing. Neighbors of Mrs. Mills express that the community no longer feels safe…_

 

“That’s...awful.” Regina manages to say as she returns the paper. Her mouth has suddenly gone very dry.

 

“You can say that again. Almost passed out when I saw your, I mean, _her_ name.” Marian tells her as she pulls her curly hair into a bun. Regina can feel her eyes examining her. “You OK?”

 

“Yes, yes. I’m alright.” Regina says feeling a shiver going down her arms. Marian holds her gaze, pressing her to tell the truth. “It’s just...I don’t know even know what to call it.”

 

“It’s fucking weird.” Marian sighs with a small smile. A kindness, Regina knows what follows it. “Want to stay at my place tonight?”

 

She shakes her head, like she always does when Marian suggests it. It’s their weekly routine, Marian asks hoping Regina will say yes while Regina says no wanting to say yes. She’s never had to explain it to Marian, she’d taken one look at her mother in her pearls and black silk and known Regina could never accept. Understood all too well when she heard her say “yes, mother”.

 

“And put up with the blind witch on a Friday?” Marian asks scowling at the thought of Regina’s roommate.

 

“I think she might have found some children to eat tonight, actually.” She replies feeling a small laugh in her throat. “Besides, I’ve got work to catch up on at the lab.”

 

“Ugh. Don’t even tell me.” Marian leads them to their usual bench and hands her a brown greased stained bag. “You and those machines.”

 

“We can’t all steal from the rich and give to the poor.” She pops the soda can open and takes a sip from it. Regina loves Fridays.

 

“It’s called being a public defender, Regina Isabel” The fondness with which Marian says her names so strongly that it makes it impossible to bite down her smile. Regina suspects this how Marian’s mother scolded her when she was a little girl. “Now eat up before your pupusa gets colder.”

 

“Did Juancito use loroco this time?” She asks and takes a bite and there it is, the distinct green and flowery flavor inside the cheese.

 

“Like he’d ever leave it out when you're involved. Says the way to a woman's heart is through her stomach” Marian says with an eyeroll.” I keep telling him you're hopeless.”

 

Regina always likes to imagine what Marian's place must be like. Filled with people she calls family but shares no blood with. Occasionally getting a letter or phone call from her mother back home, just to say _estoy bien, estoy viva_. And it hurts in an ugly way, in a way that shouldn't. Regina knows that in so many ways she's luckier that Marian is but she can't help but linger on the ways she isn't.

 

“I,” She allows herself the dramatics as she clears her throat and quirks her brow. “Am not hopeless.”

 

Marian laughs wholeheartedly, shakes her and some curls come loose from her bun. “Gorda, you’re spending Friday in a dungeon lab punching numbers into a screen.”

 

“That it’s not how it works,” Regina says indignant. “It’s a language and there’s also the hardware itself which is not..”

 

“Ah ah, I don’t want to know.” She sighs heavily. “Just promise you’ll come out for air at some point. Have a late dinner.”

 

“I’ll even drive downtown. Happy?” If it were anyone else they would have been offended by her cutting her tone was but Marian just grabs the empty and greasy paper bag from her and crumbles into a ball with a smile before kissing her goodbye.

 

“Call if you need me.”

 

“Claro.” Regina knows it doesn't sound nearly as dismissive as she meant to be.

 

Regina would never admit it to Marian but this lab _is_ a dungeon lab. Now complete with the smell of burnt flesh, the soldering iron had reached her finger and now she has something to explain to mother on Tuesday. Why her skin is broken, and why her fingernail is bruised and another chipped.  Regina’s expected to look the way she was bred, for better things. Like there isn't a flaw to her, like she could pass for someone else. She's meant attract things to help her climb a ladder she wants to burn down, her mother won’t let her forget. It’s why she is here. To be _better,_ go farther than Cora Mills ever did. She sees something in computers, prides herself in being able to predict success and fortune. And this is where her daughter is meant to be, with a foot in the future before it even arrives.

 

“Su mamá es bruja” daddy would say whenever she said things like that, whenever she pushed Regina into something that constricted her, always for her own good. She has stopped believing that’s true, mother is just one of those people that has a talent for forcing things to happen. Sucking on her injured finger and searching her bag for the cream she has learned to carry she stumbles on an old realization. Regina lets mother do this to her, it’s the only thing that seems to work. Fighting back just tightens her mother’s coils around her. She’s biding her time, that’s what she tells herself. Do this one thing and she’ll earn her freedom. It’s a lie. Her skin turns cold the way it always does when she thinks about mother, it’s how she knows it’s time to get back her work.

 

She’s good at this, Regina forgets when mother invades her thoughts. Better than good, and she has never known how to explain it to anyone else. Certainly not her man-boy classmates. They like to talk in technical terms, about materials, about their new methods, about _this will change the world._ Regina doesn’t see any of that when she sees the wiring in a panel, the code flashing green against the black of a computer screen. It feels alive somehow, how everything works like a neural system. Fuse two wires together, make them meet over silicone and you get something that hadn’t existed before. Just like she could type in ones and zeroes in a different order and modify how something behaved, change its purpose. It makes Regina feel like there _is_ something she can control. Her mother can have her ambitions and her stocks, she can have this. The quiet hum of a thinking computer and the click of keys. Marian’s right, she is hopeless. With that and an exasperated sigh she checks her watch, quarter past eight. Time for that air she promised.

 

It’ll be almost nine before she gets to the restaurant. The drive is good for her, makes her thoughts clearer for tomorrow’s work. These gears of hers are always working, like daddy teased. Terca is what he used to call her. He first said it when she broke her arm falling off Rocinante and she swore up and down she was fine, she could get back on him. He used it again and again whenever she undid her hair into its curls, said the wrong thing and paid the price with mother. This is where she ends up whenever her mind needs to quiet down, back to daddy’s hushed and sweet voice. Three years gone and she still goes to him when she needs to breathe and quiet down. There, now your gears aren't going so fast, he would have said.

 

It takes her a while to find a spot at this time in this neighborhood, she’s not happy about having to leave her car four blocks away. All this for good pasta and an owner who overlooks she’s nineteen and serves her wine anyway.

 

It’s crowded tonight but they’d given her a table by the bar, the place is loud with the clinking of glass and silverware and the white noise of the late night news. There’s the kitchen steam and the shouts to the waiter that’s a little too slow. Regina breathes it all in before taking a bite of a raviolo and feeling just how hungry she really is. She’s halfway through the one glass of red wine the owner lets her have and thinks that tonight is a good night. Regina presses her fingers to ease the crick in her neck and turns her head toward the TV.

 

“This is just in: Miss Regina Mills was found murdered in her apartment in San Pedro today. This brutal crime comes in the wake of the execution of Mrs. Regina Mills in Playa del Rey. Police urge contact…”

 

She can’t breathe, she’s forgotten how to get air into her lungs. Regina’s face has gone numb and her fingers can’t stop twitching. Somehow she manages to get on her feet and walk over the payphone because even the sounds around her have suddenly been muted. Playa del Rey, San Pedro, she remembers them. Her knees feel weak as Regina braces herself against the wall and cracks the phonebook open. There she is, Mills, Regina I. 309 Orlando Road. The last of three.

 

“Fuck.” This isn’t real life, she can’t feel her body. _Call me if you need me._ Regina lifts the receiver and smashes it when she realizes the line is dead.

 

She has the sense to leave cash and grab her bag before she heads out the door. The night air hits her and her stomach jumps when she remembers that her stupid car is four blocks away. Regina puts one foot of the other, grateful that at least they know what to do. She is two blocks away, _almost there_ , when a chill down her spine tells her that she’s being followed. Careful and deliberate steps behind her, not so spaced that she wouldn't notice.The muffled music from a club hits her and instinctively Regina goes in without daring to look back.

 

“Do you have a payphone?” She shouts over the music to the girl up front.

 

“Yeah, in the back!” Regina starts towards the entry. “Hey, five bucks!” She scrambles for change and rushes in.

 

It’s dark save for the purple and yellow lights flashing through the place. Regina is dialing Marian’s number before she even knows what she’s doing.

 

“Regina!”She says before she can get a word out. “Tell me you’re OK. I saw the news and…”

 

“I’m fine, just shaken up.” Regina swallows and moves the receiver closer to her mouth. “I think someone’s following me.”

 

“Ay _mierda_.” It sounds like Marian just dropped her phone for a second. “Listen, where are you?”

 

“I’m at a place called Tech Noir.” Cold sweat runs down her back.

 

“ On Pico? That's not far, I can…”

 

“No!” Regina surprises herself. “There's no point.”

 

“Fine, just stay with the crowd, don't even go to the ladies’,”She pauses as if to catch her breath. “ Call the police and when I suggest that you know to do it.”

 

“Yo sé.” Just hearing Marian’s voices steadies her enough to think of the next of five minutes. “Could you call the blind wi, I mean, Becky and leave a message tell her to get out the apartment and where to find me? Just in case.”

 

“Of course. Llamame when you get to the station so I can come get you.” She can hear Marian breathing in. “Regina?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Stay safe, OK?”

 

Regina nods because her words don’t cooperate for a few seconds. “I’ll try.”

  
  


With a click she ends the call and dials 911. The police department puts her on hold before the lines goes dead. So she tries again and again until the call finally goes through. Regina has managed to skip straight into the angry side of fear and so she yells at a Lieutenant Traxler who takes her call, not to dare to hang up on her or transfer her to another department. To his credit he sounds composed and takes her seriously before repeating some of Marian’s words. Stay there, stay visible and a squad car will be there to pick her up soon.

 

Soon turns into twenty of minutes of sitting at a dirty table with half empty drinks clutching her purse, knowing she’s being watched. It’s taking too long and it’s just a damn squad car with one damn officer driving it, the city can spare it. But Regina can’t leave either, the second she’s out that door she’s a sitting duck. Her eyes scan what they can through the purple and yellow and she wonders who of all those men can it be. Tall and thin by the restroom, big and broad by the bar, peach fuzz being rejected on the dance floor? She is too busy watching that blonde one sipping his beer that she doesn’t notice the man with the perfectly normal face and build standing in front of her. Holding up a slick gun and raising it up to her head.

 

“GET DOWN!” Someone shouts at her and Regina obeys without hesitation.

 

Shots that have her ears ringing are fired, slow and loud and she sees the man stumbling as she scrambles away toward the exit. There’s a wave of people screaming and running and she’s caught in the middle of it, with her heart in her throat. There are more shots, closer together and sharper, an automatic. The kind that makes no sense. The slow shots are back just as someone falls on top of her and she can’t get away. He moves closer to her, reloading his weapon. Regina can’t believe that these are the last seconds of life she’s allowed. But she manages to look past him and sees a smaller figure holding a shotgun and walking towards the man. Four shots hit the man and he falls through the window and onto the street.

 

Regina struggles to lift the body on top of hers and she feels a hand on her shoulder. But that’s not what she’s concerned with. The man, the perfectly normal man with the perfectly normal face is raising his head from the pavement.  Moving his fingers like he’s warming them up, not even bothered with glass shards or the blood. The weight is lifted off her and her arm is being shaken. She tears her eyes away from him to find a girl around her age, blonde hair and determined green eyes.

 

“Come with me if you want to live!” She says extending her free hand and somehow that does it for Regina. Without a second thought she takes her hand and runs away with her as the man finds his footing again.

 

Every time she feels her clammy hand slipping away from hers the girl locks their fingers together. They’re going down the back alley and their breathing is getting heavier. But they can’t stop not when they’re being hunted by a man that won’t stay down, she knows that much. Regina dares to look back and sees that the club’s metal back door is kicked open. She wants to wake up from whatever nightmare she’s in. The girl hasn’t said anything else, just lets her eyes wander to hers. If it were any other night Regina would be wondering about what’s behind them, if suddenly they didn’t have to pick up the pace because that man is gaining on them. His legs move like they’re powered by something inhuman, and he’s close enough that she can see how vacant his expression is. He fires his gun and the bullets hit somewhere behind of them. In those three seconds the girl seems to make a decision. She opens a car door and shields her with her body as she fires at another car. Half the alley is engulfed in flames and before Regina’s head can stop spinning they’re inside the car.

 

The questions she has aren’t coming together, not even a simple what? comes out. The girl starts the car in the blink of an eye and drives away. Then Regina is screaming. The man has jumped on the hood of the car and she watches him pull back his arm. He seems to move so slowly as he punches through the windshield and grabs her by the shirt. Pulling away from him, his grip never loosens. He has blue eyes that look nowhere but her, he doesn’t blink. The world is soundless again when a shot goes off at her side and Regina is still in his grip. There’s another shot, a violent jerk forward and then a gentler hold on her chest. It’s the girl’s arm, bracing her as they back away.

 

She asks something Regina can't hear, shifting gears and sparing her a glance. “You hurt?” She's shouting but Regina can only tell by the strain at her throat.

 

Regina manages to shake her head. If she could gather the strength she thinks she might hurl. But her body just falls back on the seat and her eyes water. She looks over at this stranger that seems to have some sort of plan, who seems to know what to do when she doesn’t.

 

“Who?” She croaks as her nails digging deep into the leather of her arm rest.

 

“Me?” She waits for Regina to nod. “I’m here to help. Swan, Sergeant/Techcom DN3914,” Swan says like any of this is supposed to make sense to her or matter. There is a certain shyness hidden somewhere there, she can tell. It’s maybe the one remaining normal thing left tonight. “I’ve been assigned to protect you. You got a terminator after you.”  

 

There it is again, a statement that sounds logical but when taken apart is just nonsense. Her pulse is still racing but she can sit up and the twitch in her fingers is barely there. In a minute or two she might be able to say how ridiculous every word this Swan girl just spouted. Bullshit, is more like it. Regina looks at her, checking her mirrors, checking that her shotgun is within reach, white knuckled hands gripping the wheel of the car. A siren goes off in the distance and the blades of a helicopter close in on them.

 

“Hold on.” It’s almost as if she expected worse and speeds through narrow streets with no real pattern in mind.

 

“This is a mistake.” Regina says with her grip tight on her armrest.

 

“What?”

 

“I haven’t done anything!” Her voice so sharp and tight that it snaps.

 

“No, but you will,” There is that thing about her expression that tells Regina that she believes these things and desperately wants her to believe them too. “It’s important that you don't die.” This isn’t hitting at her logic but at something deep that yearns for more. The ugliness that liked those words, the ugliness that doesn’t make them true.

 

“This isn’t happening. This is not real.”  Regina says more to herself as she shakes her head. “That man. I saw you shoot him…”

 

“Not a man, a terminator. A t-800.”

 

“Like a robot?”

 

The sirens are still going off somewhere behind them, but it sounds like they’re losing them. Maybe Regina should jump out of the car but something, something completely illogical tells her that this girl is her best chance. She’d gotten her out alive, hadn’t she? Regina can brave it out for a few more minutes just until it’s safe to leave.

 

“It’s un…”Swan searches her thoughts for a second. “It’s un cyborg. It’s got everything. Living skin, bad breath. Sweat.  Designed for infiltration.”

 

“As in a cybernetic organism?” She throws her look and finds her real voice. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

 

“Qué?” She blinks at her in surprise. “Uh no. I don’t.”

 

“The things you’re talking about, they’re impossible!” Regina looks down at her bruised and burned fingers. “I know they are.”

 

“They won’t be. Not in forty years.”

 

And Regina laughs, actually laughs. It would be wonderful to have her stomach hurt like this any other night. “So what are you saying? That that man is from the future?”

 

“One possible future. Maybe.” And for the first time Swan looks unsure about what she’s saying. “I don’t really know tech stuff.”

 

“So I suppose that means you’re from the future too?”

 

Regina watches for her reaction carefully. Swan’s shoulders tense up like she’s remembering more than she wants to. She nods her head and it’s possible she has inkling of how strange this all because her eyes shift a little as she sighs. Crossing a red light and going into a three story parking lot she gets her first real look at the girl. Knotted and dull blonde hair, dirt under her fingers. Swan is thinner than she should be. Her clothes are all mismatched, red leather jacket, torn jeans a size too big and basketball sneakers. She certainly looks the part of someone completely out of her mind.

 

“Should lose it in here.” Swan says with a hollow voice.

 

“What?” Just like that her heart picks up again because there’s something she’d missed. Something Swan hadn’t.

 

“It’s still tailing us. It’s in a black and white car.” Her eyes go the rearview mirror so that Regina sees the flashing police sirens in the distance.

 

“We’re switching cars.” Regina understands, still believing this isn’t real. If it is, then it’s insane.

 

They move smoothly through the rows of parked cars, Swan keeps their hands together. Like she’s afraid she’ll lose her. Their feet barely make a sound and Regina wonders if this girl trained herself to walk so unnoticed. Her arm reaches in into a half open window and ushers her into the car. Regina realizes that if she were going to escape the moment would be now but that ridiculous feeling that comes deep from the gut tells her to stay. They’re lying low, Swan clutching her shotgun and looking out the windows. Regina has no choice but look at her. No option but to take in the a bruise on her neck, the pink scar by her left ear and the fresh scrapes on her knuckles.Still, she doesn’t believe her. How could she?

 

“Why me?” Regina  whispers. “You said I’ll do something. What is it?”

 

Swan turns to look at her as if she hadn’t expected to be questioned. “There’s just...it’s too much.” She pinches her eyes closed, like she’s trying to make sense of things. To put her words together so that Regina will understand them.

 

“Go back to the beginning then.” Maybe she’s feeding her delusions but she needs to know why this girl saved her life. Why she thinks it’s matters so much.

 

“It happened. I mean, it will in a few years. August 29th 1997,” She swallows and tightens her grip on her shot gun. “Nuclear war.”

 

“How?” It seems too big to be true. Her fate isn’t tied to something so big, Regina knows that. She doesn’t want it to be.

 

“Machines. We trusted them run everything, right? It’s all just numbers anyway.” Swan’s voice is flat with a type of cold hatred. “We gave them control and one day they…”

 

“Decided we were the biggest threat?” Regina completes for her feeling something drop into her stomach.

 

“Yeah. Everything gone in one second. Or that's what they say,” Swan must see the confused look on her face. “I was born after, in the ruins. Machines kept us alive for work.” She pushes up the sleeve of her jacket to reveal an almost translucent bar code burned onto her skin. Here is some proof something she could reach out and feel with her fingers but chooses not to. Because these things she’s saying can’t be true. She doesn’t want them to be.

 

“What happened...what happens?” Her voice is still low and her eyes still focused on her, searching for a crack in her face. A twitch, anything that’ll tell Regina it’s all an act. There’s nothing. Regina thinks of wires and codes, of mother who pushes her too hard. Thinks maybe Swan will tell her something links them together.

 

“This man just came up one day. He taught us how to fight. How to organize, how to blow all that metal to hell. Everything he’d learned from his mother.” There’s a slight smile on her face and she can’t help but notice how different it makes her look. “He’s your son.”

 

“No. No. You’re lying.” She hisses through her teeth and moves away from her. Regina’s hand is on the door handle, ready to pull and run.

 

Swan grabs her by the wrist and shakes her head in warning. “Just listen. His name is Henry Mills and he sent me back for you.”

 

Her sight darkens as her fingers drop from the metal of the door. Henry, Henry. Her father’s name, the one he’d shortened and changed when he’d first set foot here. Henry, Henry. Her son, her son. This is what cuts straight through any argument, everything her mind is throwing at her. Regina knows that everything must be true and that she is awake. The world looks unchanged to her open eyes but it’s never going to be the same. She raises the palm of her hand  and expects it to be covered in ash of the world that will burn.

 

Swan’s readjusts herself into the driver’s seat as a glint of light hits a mirror. She waits one, two beats and then there’s the screech of the tires. This is her life now, burned rubber and the smell of gunpowder. That thing, is after them again, A blur of red and blue followed by bullets that graze them. They’ve barely made it out of the parking lot when the back window shatters along with her eardrums. Regina only knows what Swan is saying because she can read her lips and sees the shotgun in her hand. Half of her body is out the window while the other half is practically on Regina’s lap. The streets are practically deserted as she puts her whole weight into the pedal and takes sharp turns after she’s heard a shot go off at her side. They might just outrun it, they might just get away. Regina feels the car not being able to go any faster as the squad car catches up with them. She takes the first right turn and somehow it had managed to set them up for a trap. It’s a dead end.

 

“Faster!” Swan shouts unable to see the danger. Regina presses on seeing the white wall at the end of the road. Immovable object and a force that would bow down to it. So she turns the wheel of the car at the last possible second. Instead of one squad car there are eight. None of them the cyborg’s. All pointing their guns at them. She pulls Swan back into the car and sees that she’s reloading her weapon, already opening the car door.

 

“No! Swan, stop! They’ll kill you!” Regina grabs her arm and takes her shotgun. “Just do what I do.”

 

They both go out with their hands in the air. She couldn’t count the seconds before they were both in handcuffs.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally one with the first but they feel two distinct and here we are!
> 
> Marian is Salvadoran and this is a nod to Salvadoran civil war that made many people leave for California and settle in Pico Unión in LA during the 80s, up to the early 90s. She'd left before the war and her mother calls her to reassure her that she's still alive. 
> 
> Emma Swan is better than Kyle Reese, that's just the way it works.


	3. E2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: cops being cops. Description of gun violence and a mention of a gun wound.

Emma doesn’t understand. That’s the bottom line in this mess. She doesn’t get why there are metal cuffs around her wrists. It doesn’t make sense why she and Regina Mills were separated or the look on her face when Emma had yelled cabrón at one of the men. They were all dressed in the same blue and they stuck in her room with her arms behind her back. But most of all she doesn’t understand why the hell they’re holding her, why they called a Doctor Whale to just stand there and talk to her.

 

“Let me go. I don’t have time for this.” Emma’s eyes are fixed on his.

 

“You’ve heard the good officers, Miss Swan,” There is something sick in the way he pronounces her name. Something dirty and slippery. “You resisted arrest, committed assault with a deadly weapon. This is for your own good.”

 

Emma throws her head back and looks up at the ceiling. “Bullshit.”

 

“Tell my why it is.” He says pulling up a chair. And she hates him and his white teeth. Hernández would say he’s a cerote mal cagado and Emma wouldn’t disagree.

 

“I’m in here because you won’t listen to me.”

 

“Something about Miss Mills in the other room being in danger?”

 

“Yes!” If she could slam her fists on the table she would do. “And you just left her!”   

 

“She is perfectly safe…”

 

“No! It’s still out there! It’ll find her!”

 

Whale exchanges a look with the men in the back. “It? Do you mean the man who attacked Miss Mills?”

 

“It’s not a man.” She mutters under her breath. Emma knows that this where she might lose them. Where she has to explain who she is and where she’s from.

 

“Why is _it_ after Miss Mills, do you know?” She isn’t dumb and lies she can spot from miles away.

 

“She’s very important for our future,” It the safest thing to say, she can tell by looking all three men looking at her with their arms crossed. “And you’re being careless.”

 

“That’s not very specific, is it? After all this man did shoot and kill Miss Mills’s roommate a...Rebecca Jameson.” The one the farthest away from her says.

 

“She just happened to be home at the wrong time, we suspect,” Another, shorter man tells her. “Which leaves the question if this the same killer of the other two Regina Mills?”

 

Emma nods and tries her luck at loosening her cuffs. Nothing.

 

“How can you be so sure?”

 

“It didn’t know what she looked like. It was just being systematic, she needed to be dead no matter what.”  

 

“Now, Miss Swan. Care to explain that to us?” Whale seems like he wants to reach out and touch her so Emma pushes herself back hard enough that she almost topples over.

 

“Whale, pull it back.” This man looks tired and he with his back against a wall. “Kid, we just need the truth so we can help you both.” There is something there’s that’s true but Emma can’t tell what it is.

 

Emma sighs thinking of Regina Mills. If she still believes her, if these men aren’t lying and she’s safe. If she’s ran away already, gone into hiding. The right thing is to hope that she has but there’s this part of her that doesn’t want to be left behind. Not again. And now that she’s seen her, now that she isn’t just an old photograph and Henry Mills’s mother Emma doesn’t want to let go. Maybe the truth will get her out these handcuffs and back to her. So she tells them. About Skynet and how it took over the world. About the work camps, the butchery for those who couldn’t work anymore. Emma sits as straight as she can when she talks about Henry Mills and the day when they almost won. The day she was sent back to protect.

 

“Why not kill Mills right there and then?” Whale asks and at least that mask of concern he’d been wearing is gone.

 

“It wouldn’t have mattered. We’d won. Henry Mills had to be erased.” Saying these things was a mistake. She doesn’t know what will happen to her, to Regina Mills. Emma’s failed.

 

“So Skynet? Sent back a machine to kill the mother of its enemy. A sort of retroactive abortion?” Emma would like nothing more than to punch the smile off face.

 

“What the fuck are you even talking about?!” This isn’t going anywhere and the longer she stays the angrier she gets.

 

“There is no need for this, now if you would just…”

 

“YOU’RE LETTING HER DIE! AND YOU DON’T CARE! YOU DON’T CARE!” Emma manages to push the table with her knees as she gets up. Her arms are readjusted as two men grab her. Rápida is what Henry Mills called her the first time she took down a tanker.

 

“Now watch yourself, girl,” The shorter man tells her. “Don’t make us do something we don’t wanna do.”

 

Emma only glares at him as her chest squeezes her. She isn’t scared but he thinks she should be.

 

“I think the best option is to keep her here. Just until she calms down.” Whale says not even looking at her. Like she’d suddenly disappeared. “Under my supervision, of course.”

 

“Sure. I think we’ve got what we…”

 

There’s a loud crash somewhere behind the room. The machine’s here, it found them. It was always going to find them. Bullets will come next like they always do. And these men aren’t doing enough.

 

“Whale, stay here,” The shorter man opens the door and calls two other men in. “You two, watch her.”

 

Emma uses the change of guard to get herself off her chair, surprise had worked out her way. She’d managed a hard enough hit on one of them and pushed the other outside the room. The one knocked out on the floor should have the keys to her cuffs. Emma kneels and stretches as far down she can to reach them. Her heart is the loudest it’s ever been, she can feel up in her head and down to her toes. But her fingers are quicker than she thought, her wrists are free from that metal and the keys pocketed. She only remembers Whale is in the room when he whimpers when she kicks the cuffs his way.

 

“You should find a way out.” It’s about all she can spare him as she bolts out of the room.

 

The grey and brown halls are filled with smoke and the alarm is piercing her ears. Men are running up down the place. Too busy with the machine attacking them that they don't notice her. The alarm and the sound of casings falling to the floor means Regina Mills is alive, it hasn’t made its way through all the men to get to her. She feels something being torn inside her when she realizes that she doesn’t know where they’re keeping her. Emma half slips because her feet aren’t fast enough to keep up with her pulse and she tries every door as she goes along. She finds a locked one, that's it. This time she gets to smash the glass and hear it break before she opens the door.

 

“Regina?!” Emma forgets she’s a soldier. It's the first time she says her name and it's pretty damn desperate.

 

“I’m over here.” Her voice is quiet coming from a corner. “I’m cuffed to the radiator.”

 

Emma can see that she’d tried to shield herself by moving a piece of furniture as best she could, her arm the only thing poking out of place. She pushes it aside and unlocks her cuff and her wrist is redder than hers. They were supposed to protect her. They told her she was safe. And they just had just trapped her here. Jueputas.

 

“They wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t let me call Marian, wouldn’t….”She cuts herself short and wipes her tears away. “I don’t..I don’t understand.”

 

“We’re going, OK?” Emma pulls her to her feet.

 

“OK.” Regina says looking she just swallowed all her pain. Like it’s an old trick. This time she’s the one to take Emma’s hand as they run out the room.

 

There’s fire and water now, the shots are louder and louder. It’s less confusing than the streets. One of those men had crawled and died right there and out of habit she swipes his weapon. Emma hopes that the machine hasn’t found its way, that maybe all these men could do something in the end. But then she sees it, pale skin over metal, rounding the corner. Regina pulls her away before she can get a shot in. But it’s seen them and its heavy steps boom like a machine’s always do. Then it’s a rain of bullets when those who are still alive move to fight it. One nips her shoulder just as she fires back at it as it closes in on them. Her shots only make its head budge to take the hit. Emma suddenly sees the Regina Mills of her son’s stories, the one who thinks on her feet. Her mind too quick even for a machine because she’s found them a way out of this maze of smoke and blood. She pushes a door open, one Emma hadn’t known would be there, and then they’re breathing the clean air of the past. There’s a small yellow car parked right in front of them and somehow they both know to get in. Keys in the ignition and they drive off before the terminator catches them. Suerte is what got them out. Suerte.

 

* * *

 

They don’t know where they’re going. It’s just away and that’s good enough for Emma. North, maybe. She’s glad it’s so late and dark out and the stars, those things she’d heard about, get brighter as she presses on. She has her window down and this nightwind is nothing like those of her time. It’s cool and whistles past her. Regina lies with her head against the closed window. She’s not asleep and she rubs at the red of her wrist. Emma lets her, it’s not like she has a clue what to say to her. So it’s just the wind and Regina’s breathing.

 

It’s never been like this, driving on a road so long that it looks like it won’t ever end. Before she could only feel the cranks in the engine and feel the metal shaking under her feet. Emma in the future had to count just how many times she was allowed to hit the brakes. Which way was the safest to crash it into a sentinel. She’s learning what wheels on concrete sound like, that they have a steady pace to them. It’s enough to set her head straight, slow it down enough that her chest isn’t so tight anymore. She remembers Henry Mills’s stories about this time but she never thought it’d be so easy to give herself to it. It’s not like it was back in the city where everything was too much, here it’s just them. It feels safe and Emma knows it’s wrong. That she shouldn’t ever feel safe but she can’t fucking help it.

 

There’s a sound on the road that she doesn’t recognize. Emma knows it’s the wind but it sounds like it’s moving through something in the dark but she can't imagine what. And just like that she can hear Henry Mills’s words, the ones he’d said when she’d been sealing off a wound in his arm.

 

_“ I wouldn’t stop crying when I was few weeks old. Mom thought there was something wrong with me.”_

 

_“What she do?” She’d asked tightening the gauze._

 

_“She didn’t want to risk doctors or records but she didn’t know what else to do. Mom strapped me in and took off. I stopped crying as soon as we’d gone past a few blocks.” He’d laughed and looked at her. “She told me that she should’ve known, I was my mother’s son after all.”_

 

Maybe that’s it, the wheels and the engine that have Regina quiet like this. Henry Mills said that it was one of the things they could do, take long drives. It didn’t matter if they knew where they were going and he remembered the look on his mother’s face. _Con cara de mejores tiempos_ but he never said what those were. Or when Regina had time to live them but it’s not like she knows a whole lot about the past. People could have time for more, do a lot in so little. That’s what she thinks anyway. It’s what she would do. Night gets thicker and she’s trying to keep her eyes from closing. It isn’t like her and she needs to be stronger than this. But Emma’s fingers slip from the wheel and her breathing gets slower.

 

“Swan, wake up or you’ll kill us both,” Regina’s voice snaps her eyes open. “Let me drive for a while.”

 

“I..” She wants to come up with a reason as to why she shouldn’t, wants to say it’s her part of the job.  But she can’t. “Yeah. OK.”

 

Emma pulls over and she hurts all over as she steps out the car. Stiff knees and a numb all over, she doesn’t know how long they’ve been going. She takes a good look at the clear sky and remembers something about Orión but not enough to find it. Stars still don’t look real to her. Regina moves past her and looks like she wants to say something but closes her mouth and waits. Emma gets back in the car without another word. She watches Regina readjust her seat, she’s smaller than she expected. Henry Mills had always made her sound so big but there’s that thing in her eyes. Deeper than anything she's seen. He’d know how to describe it but she’s just Emma so she settles for looking at her from the corner of her eye.

 

“This car is a deathtrap,” Regina says after a while and then she’s laughing like she’d done earlier. “Of all the cars to steal you pick this one.”

 

And because she’s still laughing Emma starts laughing too. Maybe they laugh until they both can’t take it and she feels water in her eyes.

 

“Are there stars in the future?” Regina asks and her voice is all rough. It’s what she’d wanted to ask before.

 

“Can’t see them, dust storms.” She thinks the first time she thought she’d seen one, she’d been five or maybe six. Emma’s bad at keeping track of those things.

 

“Hmm.” Regina doesn’t know what to say. Emma might not be able to get a good read on this time yet but she can on her. Regina's been with her for a long time.

 

“They’re uhh...nice.” Emma mumbles.

 

“What was that?”

 

“The stars. I like them.” She presses her forehead against the glass.

 

“I do too.” Regina says quietly or at least she thinks she does. Emma feels herself drift off. Not even guilt can keep her from falling asleep.

 

It’s the engine gone quiet that wakes her up and her breathing gets faster. Like it should’ve been all this time. That thing is back at squeezing at her chest and she finds Regina looking at her like she’s seen what’s going up in her head. Her hand stopped short of touching Emma and becomes a loose fist as she lowers it.

 

“The car ran out gas. And I think we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

 

“Need to get it off the road, then.” Emma’s almost sorry to say it and thinks it’s another sign of this time getting to her.

 

They search it for supplies and come out with a blanket, a medkit and a flashlight.

 

“The owner probably camped out a lot.” Regina says tossing the blanket over her shoulder.

 

“Yeah, probably.” She has no idea what that’s supposed to mean but guesses Regina’s probably right.

 

They push the car off road and go down a pass under the road. It’s cold, she almost forgot about this. It’s cold and they have to spend without any real shelter. They sit opposite each other and Regina tosses the blanket at her.

 

“You look frozen, Swan.” She says before Emma can give it back. Regina thinks she can't see her hands going under her legs.

 

“Emma. My name’s Emma.” It suddenly became important to hear it. She knows one whole person in the entire world and Emma wants her to call her by her name.

 

“You introduced yourself as Swan.” Regina points out her eyebrows meeting, like she’s saying that the mistake isn’t hers.

 

“Habit,” Emma licks her lips. “No sabía how..didn’t know what you’d be expecting.” She admits.

 

“Does everyone speak like you?” Her eyes look sharp even in the dark.

 

“Cómo?”

 

“Nevermind.” Regina says like she got her answer.

 

She tries not to shiver and that's when Emma gets up and makes sure she's covered. “I’m not the important one here.”

 

“Don't be ridiculous,” Regina throws half of it over Emma's shoulders as she drops down next to her. “And quit it with that noble soldier routine.”

 

“But I’m…” Regina gives her a look that tells her that the smart thing to do is to shut up. “We can..umm” Emma half says lifting her arm so that Regina can get under it.

 

Without a word Regina lies against her, letting Emma's arm cover her.

 

“God, what ...” Regina says pulling away from her but feeling her arm. “Is that blood?!”

 

“Caught one back there.” Emma is glad she doesn't wince when Regina's fingers stay on the wound.

 

“You mean you got shot?!” She's angry and Emma doesn't know at what. Maybe she thought she was better than that.

 

“Yeah. But it’s just meat,” It’s not that bad and it comes off as a whine. “It went through.”

 

“Idiot.” Regina says but Emma gets it now. She’s worried. “Take this off.” Her hand pulls at her jacket and Emma bites her lips as she does.

 

Emma thinks Regina's face goes a white when she looks at it.

 

“You don’t have to do that.” She tells her watching fumble with the flashlight and med kit.

 

“Just…” Regina closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Let me.”

 

“OK.” Emma says moving closer to her.

 

“Tell me something.” She says as Emma feels the burn of medicine.

 

“Like what?”

 

“Anything so that I don’t have think about the hole in your arm.” But then Regina’s eyes shift and her breath catches a little. “Tell me about my son.”

 

“He, um.” Emma searches for the right things to say, something that would matter. “He sorta looks like you when he’s trying to focus.”

 

“He does?” The color is returning to Regina’s cheeks.

 

“Yeah,” The burn is almost gone and Emma feels how careful her fingers are. “He likes to tell stories. Think it’s his favorite thing to do.”

 

“What are they about?”

 

“You, mostly.”

 

“Oh.” Regina drops her hands for a second.

 

“Qué?” Emma asks tilting her head to look at her because her expression changed again.

 

“Nada.” She looks like she hadn’t meant to say the word. “It’s nothing. You know him and I hadn’t thought about the idea of him before today.”

 

“Messes with your head, right?”

 

Regina nods as she ties the gauze over the wound.

 

“That’s a good field dressing.” Emma pulls her jacket back on.

 

“Well, who knows? Maybe I can do this.” Regina doesn’t think it’s true, she can tell by the way she lies back against the wall and switches off the light.

 

“You can. You will.”

 

“I didn’t ask for this! For any of it!” She drops her head and covers her face with her hands.

 

“I don’t think he did either,” She might be making things worse but it’s all she has. “He misses books the most. He told me one day that he missed the small room he shared with you when he was five. Como le…”

 

“Stop. Just stop. I can’t..I can’t believe this. I don’t _want_ to.” Regina grabs at the blanket between them. “Doesn’t it bother you, Emma? That it all seems to be fixed?”

 

She suck in a breath or two. “Yes.”

 

Regina stares up at her and her eyes are red and wet. She didn't think Emma would would get it. Could be that she's disappointed in her or just that Emma isn't enough. Yeah, it could be.

 

“I volunteered to come. Or that's what I thought anyway.” Emma continues.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“It took me a while to find you, you know? Had time to think.” She doesn't know why her voice is all shaky y cortada. “I thought que tal vez...I..was supposed to come. That Henry Mills already knew it would..That I..I was angry.” There's a knot in her throat now.

 

“Because you thought you had a choice when really...” Regina’s voice trails off.

 

“But then I remembered Henry Mills’ message,” Emma meets Regina's gaze and feels something go off inside her chest. “It’s for you to hear but it...it got me through.”

 

“What is it?” Regina's voice is suddenly stronger and Emma’s heart picks up its pace.

 

“Mom, I can't help you with what you’re about to face except to say that the future is not set. And there is no other fate than what we make for ourselves.”

 

“He really is good with words.” Regina says after almost after a minute. She sighs and Emma can hear the water in her throat. She wants to ask how she manages to piece herself together like that but Emma knows better than to ask for secrets.

 

“He really believes in you.”

 

Regina says nothing instead she just returns to her place under her arm.. It’s good an answer as she’s going to get. Emma feels how Regina’s chest and rises against her side, something jumps and flies down in her stomach. It’s new and it’s just this time. This fucking time that has her believing that she can have things she was never meant to have. Still, she closes her eyes a little warmer than she’d been all night.

 

* * *

 

When she wakes up her arm is sore and the Sun is barely out. Even mornings are cold here. Cold, means Regina isn’t sleeping at her side anymore. Shit. Emma’s feet get tangled and she almost falls on her face before she realizes that Regina's just standing there. She turns to look at Emma, raised eyebrows asking the questions for her.

 

“Thought you were gone.” Emma clarifies.

 

“And where exactly would I…” Regina stops and her eyes fall to her injured arm. “I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t worry about it.” She throws the medkit and flashlight into the blanket and gets to her feet. “We should move again.”

 

They go up to the road again, quickly pass the spot where they’d pushed off the car. Regina’s eyes light up with the Sun. No one’s do that in the future, not even when the sky is clear and the heat isn’t so bad. That old photo didn’t do enough for her, something got lost along the line. Sometimes Hernández called Emma stuff like bella and she always laughed it off. Because no one really knew what the hell that word was supposed to mean to any of them or if it mattered at all. _Just keeping old words alive, nothing to it_  she’d say shrugging it off. Emma finally knows what it means.

 

A car honks past them.

 

“I’m gonna get us a car.” She says removing her gun from the back of her pants.

 

“Put that thing away!” Regina says tucking it back in. “ _I’ll_ get us a car.”

 

Emma doesn’t think it will work when she watches Regina stick out her thumb by the side of the road. She’s still gripping her gun when a pickup stops. It’s an old woman, older than anyone is in the future.

 

“What are you girls doing out here?”

 

“College party,” Regina replies quickly. “I’m afraid we were left stranded. Bad prank.”

 

The old woman can tell Regina’s lying but she doesn’t seem to care. “Right. Well, I’m heading up to Fresno…”

 

“That’s fine. We’ll get off before then.” Regina says it in a way that makes it sound like they’re doing the old woman a favor

 

“Hop in the back.”

 

“Come on, Emma.” Regina says through her teeth and she knows to just follow quietly.

 

Regina holds onto her good arm when the truck starts moving again and their knees touching. There are so many thing she didn’t think about this time, about Regina. And they’re all happening right now, all at once. The morning is getting warmer and Emma can see, all those things she couldn’t see last night. Cielo claro and she looks up at it.It’s so blue and she can hardly breathe. She can hardly breathe with Regina's hair brushing against her cheek. Emma should’ve been warned about what this time would do to her. But she’s the first to ever come back, no one could’ve told her about what it’s like to gain something instead of losing it. Fuck.

 

“Are you feeling alright?” Regina asks over the wind.

 

“Yeah.” Emma can only look at her a second. Not wanting to say more, she can’t.

 

They get off somewhere an hour away, they’d both agreed that the old woman shouldn’t remember them. There’s other people around, the sign says “rest stop.” Plenty of cars to take. There’s a smell in the air and she feels her stomach grumble. _Como te ruge la tripa_ that’s what everyone would say whenever Emma got anywhere near rations.

 

“We can find food after we wash up.” Regina says like she’s in on the joke.

 

Emma follows her lead, goes where she goes pretending it all makes sense. Water coming out of a tap in a waste room. Water she shouldn’t drink unless she wants to get sick, even if it looks clear to and fine to her. Then she’s drinking all she can from another tap outside, she doesn’t get it but she isn’t about to start questioning Regina now.  Emma wipes her lips dry. She needs to feel useful all of the sudden.

 

“This way.” She tells her sure of what she’s about to do.

 

She follows her nose to a stand. It smells like it’d fill her stomach, no idea what any of it is. Emma studies it, little pots of something red lined up in the back. Bottles inside a refri just behind the boy working there. It’s hot inside it.

 

“Uhh, can I get a double with bacon and fries?” The man standing in front of her says. He gets a brown and stained bag handed to him and he gives some paper for it.

 

“Uhh, can I get two doubles with bacon and fries?” Regina eyes her funny like she’s curious to see where this is going.

 

“Uh huh.” The boy says with a shrug.

 

It takes a few minutes before he hands her two bags that feel too heavy to be food and she makes sure to hold them tight.

 

“What are we doing?” Regina whispers already knowing the answer.

 

“Guess.” She answers. “Hey, can I get one of those too?” Emma points at the bottles and hopes that the boy isn’t fast enough. When he turns his back, they run.

 

They sit on hard concrete, hidden away from anyone who might be looking for them. Emma can’t get to it fast enough, she even rips the bag to get to the double.

 

“What is this?” She says with her mouth half full.  

 

“Fat.” Regina takes a bite out of hers and closes her eyes.

 

The inside of her mouth is all watery and Emma remembers _hey Swan, picture a new color!_ She’d been thirteen and trying to sleep and she’d been so annoyed. Because try as hard as she can, she couldn’t. This what this tastes like, like the stupid new color she couldn’t think of. It gives her chills and all the tiny hairs on the back on her neck stick up. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

 

“You really like it, don’t you? Practically devouring it.” Regina says and Emma’s pleased to see something like the beginning of a smile at corner of her mouth.

 

Emma can’t nod hard enough as she swallows. “Almost don’t wanna keep eating it because then it’ll be gone.”

 

Regina shakes her head and her lips part enough to let out a breath that could almost be a laugh.

 

“I’ve had better ones.” She says so convinced.

 

“Uh uh, not possible.”

 

There’s nothing left when they’re done and Emma’s still licking her fingers. Even if Regina’s scrunching her nose up at her. They’ll stay low long enough that people will assume they’ve gone. She sees a bridge behind them leading off the road, good for disappearing for a while. At the end of it there’s a dirt path and Regina doesn’t stop walking. Says something about being safer in there. She knows something Emma doesn’t. The ground is rough under her shoes and then she hears it. The wind moving through something like it did last night. She wants to stop when she sees all the green, the green moving with the wind. Trees, rows and rows of them. It’s like her brain doesn’t know what to do,it’s screaming at her to never stop looking. Mirá, mirá is loud inside it. It wants to drive her crazy with the way the air feels here, asks her if this what alive means. But she keeps quiet because Regina’s beside her and doesn’t need to know about the noise up there.

 

A different sound starts eating away at her, another one she can’t recognize. Still she keeps going. Regina glances at her and Emma knows there's no hiding from her. Whatever it is, it’s getting louder. Her heart races as they get closer and the Sun hits her eyes. Water, so much water running down wet stones. Clear and catching the light. This isn’t real.  Places like this in her time are dried out. With only sand, not even bones, left. This isn’t right, goddammit. Her knees hit the ground and Emma’s crying like she’s never cried in her life.

 

“Fuck.” The dirt is soft under her hands. She drops her head and shuts her eyes.

 

“What’s wrong?” Regina kneels down next to her. She shakes her head. “Emma, tell me.”

 

“I….I wasn’t,” There isn’t enough air for her to breathe and she thinks she’s going to black out. “This..I wasn’t..supposed to see this.” She feels Regina’s hand go to her back and Emma can’t stop. “I can’t..all this..just gone! Puta, I can’t take this. Regina, I...just..”

 

Regina doesn’t say anything, just keeps her hand where it is. And she’s still crying, still feeling the dirt between her fingers. Her nails digging into it, past the green. Emma looks up at her and remembers she’s why she came back. Regina's here, alive and her hair catches the light too. Regina nods, it’s OK. That’s what it means, so Emma sits up and watches the water run down the stones. Lets the sound of it against the stone and la brisa, because she remembers that old word now, keeps her grounded. There is no way of telling how long they sit there, trying to match the other one’s breathing.

 

“Sometimes I forget.” Regina says and it’s soft. The softest Emma’s heard her.

 

“Forget what?”

 

“That it’s is all here,” She takes a deep breath and maybe Regina’s seeing what she is. “I shouldn’t.”

  
“No. You shouldn’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Henry's message is taken almost exactly from John Connor's message to his mother, it's this part of the message that started it all because it's most Regina Mills and Emma Swan thing to ever come from sci-fi.


	4. R2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thought I'd update a little early because it works out better for this week. 
> 
> TW: gun violence and mentions of blood.

It's a nice day even as nice days go, Regina knows that. Or rather, she is reminded of the fact. The breeze is gentle against her unwashed skin and she welcomes the Sun crowning her head. Hers and Emma's.They have been out in this patch of nature for a while and  has been searching for the words to describe her. It hits her when Emma's eyes widen as the purple flowers along a dirt path. Jamais vu. Regina knows that any other day, any other nice day, she would have looked at the Gracias Sage for a second or two without paying them too much mind. But now the purple pops and her eyes trace the shape of the petals. It's a fraction of what Emma sees, all through this her eyes have been brimming with tears. It makes the air catch in her throat when Emma looks at her that same way. Regina doesn't know what to make of it. She doesn't what to make of a lot of things in her life.

 

If it were up to them she knows they'd stay here. In this bubble just off the road where everything is always in bloom and the creek runs placidly downstream. As if they had all the time in the world. They could pretend that they do have it, or maybe that time has actually stopped in this place. It hasn't and they both know it. Emma starts picking at the flowers on the way back. Regina stops herself from saying that there will be others.That there will be more to see, things more beautiful than this. That would sound like a promise and it's not one she can make. There are a few things promised in their future but flowers are not one of them.

 

"Nos vámos?" Regina asks trying the words out. She'd never shared that part of herself so quickly before.

 

"Yeah. We have to." Emma replies tightening her grip on the flower stems.

 

Something from the rest stop catches Emma's attention and for a moment she feels her blood chill. But her expression isn’t hard or even vigilant, Regina could almost call it a glint. They round the corner near the toilets and Emma hands her the Gracias she’d picked. It’s not a gesture, Emma is asking them to hold them for some unsaid reason. She’s gone and back in the blink of an eye. Her hands are in her pockets as she walks past her, Emma doesn’t even look guilty. It’s why Regina doesn’t dare to look back as she catches up with her.

 

This time it's an old Bronco they steal, stupidly left unlocked. As if it were second nature to her, Emma rips a panel open and links two wires together. The car starts without a hitch.

 

"Where to?" Emma asks, as if it'd make a difference. Regina figures it's her way of giving her a choice.  Left or right.

 

"That way," She points to her right. "Quickly before the owner comes back."

 

Regina is not even sorry about leaving them stranded and she wonders if this hardness is something that has always been sitting inside her. Just waiting to surface when the time came. If it’s the beginnings of the ruthlessness mother had wanted from her, she doesn’t want it. Her thoughts need to be drowned and it’s too quiet. She reaches for the radio and settles for something she hasn't heard before. It's sounds like melancholy in one smooth vibration and Regina can almost be taken out of herself. Into whatever mystical world they’re singing about. But then her eyes find the Gracias Sage on dashboard, el rosario hanging from the rearview mirror and Emma's rough hands on the wheel. Alive, but going nowhere.

 

“Do you have a plan?” Regina asks seeing the road stretching out before them.

 

Emma takes in a deep breath and licks her lips. “I’m supposed to keep you safe.”

 

“So no, you don't have a plan.”

 

“Hey, it’s worked out so far!” Emma says, the outrage in her tone covering up for something.

 

“Are we supposed to keep running and pray it doesn't find us?”

 

The way her shoulders stiffen and how she avoids looking at her tells Regina that she has thought about this. Probably broken it down and hadn't found an answer she liked.

 

“It’s always gonna find us.” She's quiet about it, like it had cost her the world to admit.

 

“Can you stop it?”

 

“With these weapons? I don't know. You’ve seen it…”

 

“Yes, I know.” Bullets had barely stripped away some of its skin, but nothing more. “Tell me about it. About the terminator.”

 

“What do you wanna know?”

 

“Everything.”

 

Emma  jumps from one language to the other, mixes them together. It's a mess but one Regina can make sense of. Perhaps she was meant to and something inside her gut twists at the thought. _No, no_ she had wanted to know, she’d asked her for it. If Emma seems to fit into a world she hides from outsiders then it's just Emma.

 

“The CPU is up in its head?” She asks her suddenly wishing she were writing this down.

 

“Aha.” Emma catches Regina's amused laugh. “ Se me..what?”

 

“It’s nothing. It’s just so _human.”_

 

“The titanium coltan alloy covering it sure fucking isn't.” She spits out, Regina's crossed a line she hadn't even known existed.

 

“But the fact remains, the head is what we need to go after. Right?”

 

“If you could rip it off, yeah.” Emma says the possibility is ridiculous. She must catch her scowling at the corner of her eye, always from the corner of eye, because she shifts in her seat. “Couldn’t hurt to be prepared.”

 

“Good. We’re going to need supplies and somewhere to spend the night” Regina says as if she has thought of something that could defeat titanium. “Of course that’d mean we have money which we don’t…”

 

Emma tosses a wad folded bills on her lap. “That enough?”

 

They look like fresh out of a machine, they feel brand new and crisp as she counts them. There are  _hundreds_ in there. “Yes, it’s enough. Where did...when did? Actually, I don’t want to know.” Regina shakes her head thinking of Emma stuffing her hands into pockets earlier.

 

She laughs like she’s pleased with herself, like she got something right _._ Regina supposes that she did, so she gifts her a smile as she rolls her eyes.

 

It’s a couple hours until they make up their mind where to stop. A place where they won’t stand out, easy to get lost in a sea of cars and faces.

 

“What is this place?” Emma whispers as she follows her in through the automatic doors.

 

“Where souls come to die,” Regina says pulling out a cart and sees her cocking her head, lost. “It’s a store. Here, push.”

 

She’s like a child, Regina realizes. For all her scars and the roughness of her walk there is so much left for her to see. It hits her like a strong blow, like she’s forgotten how to breathe when she sees Emma gazing at the still green bananas. She has the impulse to grab everything that elicits the smallest reaction from her but remembers the finite bills in her pocket and grabs things that would last longer.  Regina looks down at herself, at the clothes she’s been wearing for two days straight. Feels the dirt and sweat inside them, the stains in her white button up. And Emma, of course, looks much worse. She grabs a few dollar shirts and a packet of underwear. If mother could see her now.

 

“What you looking for?” Emma asks peering over shoulder as she reads the label of a bathroom cleaner.

 

“Anything that will explode.” She mumbles as she decides the bottle is not good enough to be bought.

 

“No he visto plastique around.” Emma says and it takes her a few seconds to remember that Emma has to be very serious.

 

“Chain stores aren’t big on explosives. Guns, however...” Regina grabs at another bottle and is satisfied with it. “Like this, mira. Nitric acid.”

 

“That’d do it.”

 

Their cart is filled with a random assortment of things that would never go together, milk and about 3 bottles of the strongest toilet cleaner and double the amount spray cans.

 

“You girls having fun tonight?” He snorts as he scans the underwear after a half-off disinfectant.

 

Regina glares at him and watches him choke on his spit under it. Emma, who despite her time displacement, has enough sense to bite down her grin. She could almost forget about dangerous chemicals, alloys and gunpowder.

 

* * *

 

By the time the motel clerk eyes them strangely through the glass Regina is used to it. She doesn’t even bother with lies and explanations.

 

“A room with a kitchen, please.” She tells her even if she seems vaguely distracted by the portable TV on her desk.

 

“30 bucks.” She still doesn’t look all there she hands her the key. “Room 108.”

 

“Alright, Emma let’s…” Regina words fail her when she sees her crouching down, letting a dog lick her face.It looks like she’s greeting an old friend.

 

“Hey buddy, enough. Enough. Gotta go.” She tells it not even bothering to wipe her face clean.

 

“You like dogs?” Of all things Regina had not expected a soldier girl from the future to eye dogs so fondly.

 

“We use them to spot terminators. Bark like crazy when one is near.”

 

“Did yours have a name?”

 

“Lucha.” Emma as she opens the car door and reaches for a bag. “Henry Mills gave her to me.” The casual tone of her words isn’t fooling her, it must be difficult to explain how she can be homesick for the world that came after the fire.

 

With plastic bags hanging off their arms they stumble into their room. As seedy motel rooms go Regina hopes that there is actually worse ones out there because the stained carpet alone almost makes her want to spend the night in the car instead. But then she remembers shivering and how hard cement is on her back and thinks _this isn’t terrible_ . The kitchen is half way to decent and maybe in a couple of hours it won’t look so bad. It’s all different shades of brown that she’d call depressing any other time but right she hears her own voice say _it’s a roof, peor es nada_.

 

“I’m going to shower before we sort all of this out.” Regina says rummaging the bags for clothes.

 

“OK.” She knows when Emma is puzzled and pretends not to be. Her eyes get a little wider and her lips part slightly before closing into a thin line.

 

The water is cold as hits her skin and Regina doesn’t mind. She’d minded yesterday morning when Becky had used up all the hot water before her eight AM. Becky who’d taken her place with that machine and she hadn’t even know it. Here, with water running down her face, is where she cries. Regina feels the small cuts she hadn’t known to look for, the burn at her wrist that is already bruising purple. Thinks of Marian who never got her call and will have to watch the news. _Mierda, mierda._ Her mother and the guilt that should sit heavier on her chest. Emma who is just outside her door and her unborn son who is not even growing in her womb yet. Nothing make sense, time is a lie and it feels like she’s wearing someone else’s skin. Like it’s hardened overnight. But she still feels so brittle inside and Regina wonders if Emma is the same. Maybe it’s all anyone can ever become. Tough skin.

 

What must it be like the have water running down her chest for the first time? To have each drop feel like an impossibility, like a miracle. To stand under it and see it wash away whatever it she was carrying. She’d cry too then, Regina knows. She shuts the water off and carefully steps onto the cold tile. Her reflection looks back at her under the yellow light, it’s tired and older. There are dark circles around her eyes and the wet hair sticking to her forehead makes her look thinner. _It’s only been a day_ , she thinks. How much longer until she becomes the Regina Mills of her son’s stories?

 

The glue of her new t-shirt is making her back itch and the mattress is lumpy when throws herself on it but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.

 

“I’ll be right out.” Emma says, still playing the part of someone from the present.

 

“Fine.” Regina answers already feeling her legs become heavier and her body sinking onto the bed.

 

It’s only when the bathroom door closes that she knows she’d fallen asleep. It could have been five minutes or two hours, Regina isn’t sure. She sits up and she forgets every thought she’d ever had. Emma wet hair is dripping onto carpet, sticking to the naked skin of her chest. Her whole body is bare and Regina’s pulse ringing in her ears. It’s unclear to her why she seems to be frozen on top the cheap polyester covers, why her eyes take in every detail of her. Every scar, every mole. How her skin is darker from the neck up and pale except by the hint of pink beneath it. She feels herself swallowing and then she remembers every would-be, should-be reaction.

 

“Jesus Christ Swan, put on some clothes!” Regina throws a pillow at her as she turns her back on her.

 

“Uh..uh. Yeah? OK.” Emma says thrown but not embarrassed. “We don’t really…”

 

“Wear clothes in the future?” Regina snipes while making a point of not looking at her.

 

“Mind.” She corrects Regina. “Never really thought about it.”

 

“Well,” The words get stuck midway and Regina needs to clear her throat. “Now you know.”

 

“Now I know.” Emma echoes having pulled on cheap read sweatshirt and boxers she’d picked out for herself.

 

There is no explaining how they seem to work together so seamlessly. That’s not entirely accurate, there is an explanation, but one that requires Regina to think beyond that confines of what she  thinks possible so she accepts the ease of them. Emma doesn’t need to be told things twice. There’s a slight nod and the way she bites her lips as she measures different chemicals. Despite having seen her charge at a machine, drive and shoot it’s this quiet determination that marks as a soldier. Though Regina has never met one, she imagines this what they’re trying to sell when they say that the country needs you. This belief and focus except Emma can remember the consequences of failure. They’d never sell her tears or put her strained words on a slogan. They’d never say that she’s a child born in the rubble of the destruction men had designed years into their past.

 

“How you know all this?” Emma asks closing the cap on bottle just tight enough to prevent a spill.

 

“School,” Regina replies feeling sweat gathering up inside her kitchen gloves. “They teach you what not do. We’re just doing the opposite.”

 

“I learned how roll pipe bombs when I was nine. They’re easier than this,” Emma wrinkles her nose at the smell of one of the bottles. “Don’t smell this bad either.”

 

Regina almost goes over by milliliter watching her try and blow a loose strand of her hair that’d fallen on her face.

 

“You’ll light your hair on fire if you keep that up.” She says pulling off her gloves and pushing off her chair.

 

Regina stands behind her and pulls her damp her back. It’s still a tangled mess under her fingers, she isn’t blind to the way Emma leans back against her chair and just _lets_ her. It must be running away from certain death together that allows them this. This that doesn’t make Regina afraid to touch her or flinch when Emma reaches for her hand. There had been no time to get used to idea of Emma there had only been her.

 

“Qué hacés?” She asks when Regina separates her into three.

 

“Una trenza. It’s fishtail one, actually.”

 

“Fishtail?” Emma says vaguely concerned with the idea as she feels her newly braided hair.

 

In anyone else it might have been called vanity the way she rushed to bathroom to look at herself but Regina knows better. It’s mere curiosity and she can’t help thinking that she looks ridiculous in an endearing sort of way.  A single yellow glove still on, bare feet and blonde hair over bright red. There is no way of telling if she’s growing into this time or if it’s growing on her.

 

“Now you don’t look like a vagrant anymore.” Regina tells Emma as curls her fingers around the end of her braid

 

“You talk like him,” She says with another air of nostalgia. “Or I guess he talks like you.”

 

“He does?” Regina doesn’t know if these revelations will ever stop taking away her breath.

 

“Yeah. Uses big words no one else understands.” There is the slight curl of her lips as Emma looks at her and that hint of tease that Regina thought would’ve be unknown to her.

 

Despite Regina's protests that the carpet is putrid and it defeated the whole point of having taken a shower Emma had settled at the foot of the bed. She suspects that it’s the white glow of the television that draws her in. An old musical black and white musical is playing, one of those daddy loved so much. Once or twice Emma has asked her what a word means without taking her eyes away from the singer. Regina has replied wondering if this how she got whenever she listened to her son speak. She doesn't dare ask and feels that Emma may not know the answer.

 

“Por ella he jurado…” says the final song and the words sit heavy on Regina's as she prays that Emma doesn't need an explanation.

 

“What happens after?” Is what she asks as “fin” flashes through the screen.

 

“I don't know. They're together, aren't they?” Regina says lying back on her pillow, feeling like she suddenly can't bear the weight.

 

“Hmm.” Emma then falls quiet as if she's going over her thoughts.

 

“You don't plan on sleeping on that filth, do you?” Regina fills the silence before anything else does.

 

“Ah, no.” Emma replies so transparently that she knows she’d been counting on it.  

 

The springs dig into Regina's back as Emma throws herself next to her. She tosses the slippery covers over seeing the chill on running up her legs.

 

“I’ll get used to it.” She tells her as she accepts them.

 

“It’s just bedsheets, Emma.” Regina looks up, her eyes trading the patterns in the ceiling.

 

“Yeah. Just bedsheets.” The way she breathes out her agreement has Regina closing her eyes for a second.

 

“What's your world like?” She hadn't wanted to know. Regina supposed she still doesn't but she owes her this. The least she could is understand a little more.

 

“It’s hot,” Emma says without thinking about it. “I didn't know till today pero la comida kinda tastes like air.”

 

Regina laughs over the faint sound of the TV. “Most of us don't know where we come from.”

 

“Do you?”

 

“No. Someone found me outside a bunker. Just left there.” Emma's words are slowly getting pieced together, like she's still trying to understand them. “After that I was passed to anyone who could look after me.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Wasn't too bad. Raiders didn't snatch me for a work camp until two weeks ago.”

 

“Is that where you got…-”

 

“Coded?” Emma asks pushing up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Yeah. Henry Mills took a party to get me out.”

 

“Of course he did.” Regina whispers feeling a small surge of pride for a son she doesn't know.

 

“I asked him how he knew I was still alive and he looked at me and said que solo sabía. He just had a feeling.” Emma pulls the blankets up to her chin. “Guess now I know why.”

 

“He still would have tried even if he hadn't known.” Regina assures her feeling it to be true.

 

“Yeah. Would have done it for anyone.” This she says without hesitation. “What about you?”

 

“What about me?”

 

“What were you doing before...”

 

“You crashed into my life?”

 

“I didn't _crash_.” She reproves her.

 

“You might as well have.” Regina considers what she'd truly being doing. Dungeon labs, worrying over deadlines and what needed to be changed in her apartment and wardrobe before mother came. “I was too busy to stop and think about it.” She admits suddenly realizing how small her life was just a couple of days ago.

 

“What would you be doing right now. If you, you know..?”

 

“Are we playing twenty questions?” Regina snaps and claims a second pillows for herself. “I’d be thinking about tomorrow. So in that respect, it would have been exactly the same as tonight.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“It's not your...It’s not you.” She tightens her hold on the pillow as her stomach turns cold.

 

“Right.” Emma presses her lips together and averts her eyes from Regina.

 

“Want to know something?” Regina tries her best to shift the mood, lift whatever blame she’d placed on Emma.

 

“What?”

 

“This is my first sleepover.”

 

“Mine too.” The faint smile on her lips is all Regina needed to see before closing her eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

There is fire all around her, red and all consuming. Still, Regina is alive. She can see beyond it, even if the whole of her aches and her mind screeches in agony. Not too far away from her she can see a sandbox, there is a little boy shaping turrets and marking the spot for his moat. His black hair shines brown against the red of the flames. He can't see the fire, he can't see her. Regina tries her luck at getting his attention, she tries until her throat runs dry. She knows, she knows that if she can't get to him then he and his castle will be nothing but sand and dust to be swallowed by the wind.

 

“Henry!” It feels like her last breath.

 

He turns to look at her, with a smile she recognizes but can't place. And then there's…

 

Nothing.

 

Static is playing on the television and the covers slide off her as she sits up. It was only a nightmare, Regina wants to tell herself. But she can't distinguish it from her future. Emma stirs next to her and for a selfish moment she wants her to wake up. Wants to hear her mix up her words, say everything will work out. Tell her something about her son. But the moment passes as her fingers catch the tears that were too stubborn and lies down again a little closer to Emma. Close enough to feel her breath on her cheeks.

 

Emma doesn't mention it when Regina wakes up under her arm. Her eyes aren't wide in panic like they had been under the road, they're soft and look right through her. They have Regina running a hand through her hair as she gets to her feet.

 

“I’ll make breakfast.” She says feeling her throat as dry as it had been in the fire.

 

Emma nods with sleep still clinging to her.

 

There is something about cracking an egg and hearing it sizzle on a pan that had always brightened her day. It wasn't a sound she heard too often growing up but she can still hear daddy’s voice asking _salsa ranchera o crema?_ the moment they’re done. Even cooked in a beaten up pan and served on the motel’s chipped plates they manage to convince Regina that things are not bad. Emma ploughing through them with two pieces of untoasted bread followed by a ripe apple makes her believe that it will be good day.

 

“What we doing today?” Emma asks almost choking on her juice. She knows that the only certain thing is running. Their plan only extends as far as having chemical bombs in their back seat. So Emma eyes her carefully, not knowing what to expect.

 

“Maybe it would help if we knew where we’re going,” Regina replies. “Settle on a place and route.”

 

“Whatever’s far from here works for me.” Emma shrugs and for the first time Regina truly understands her meaning. Where they go is completely irrelevant to her.

 

“I’ll go get us a map, then.” Regina gets up watching Emma readying herself to follow. “It’s only to reception. I’ll be fine.”

 

“But...”

 

“Trust me.” Regina says clearing Emma's plate.

 

“OK.” She replies quietly, looking up at her. Emma must see something in her face, something she won't name because there's a breath that becomes a laugh.

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing.” Emma gazes at her the way she did at that creek and it makes her neck grow warm.

 

Regina is glad to feel a cool morning breeze when she steps out, even if the motel somehow looks worse in daylight.  She pulls her hand up to her chest when she feels something wet sticking it to it. The dog from last night circles her as she walks towards the reception booth.

 

“Looks like Emma isn't the only one keen on following me,” She tells it scratching behind his ears. “Or maybe she put you up to it.”

 

A man is behind the booth this time, bald but with a moustache that more than makes up for it.

 

“Do you have any state maps?” Regina asks him.

 

He looks startled to see her, as if a ghost had just spoken to him. His eyes scan her face and then her body, up and down. His attention goes to the portable TV on his desk and then back to her. He looks positively dumbfounded.

 

“Did you say something?” He asks shaking his head.

 

“Yes. Do you have any state maps?” Regina breathes in to hide her irritation, even if it’s a trick that never works.

 

“Yeah, yeah.” He backs away from his desk as if he doesn't want to turn away from her. The clerk reaches for something behind him, almost tripping in doing so. “50 cents a piece.”

 

“I’ll take two.” Regina says handing him a dollar, not wanting to wait for change.

 

“Leaving today?” He asks holding on to the maps.

 

“I don't know,” Regina's nails dig into her palms and her jaw tightens. “Couldn't say, really. I’d have to talk it over with my boyfriend.” She finds herself feeling suddenly disgusted.

 

“Oh, oh? Second night is three dollars cheaper, did Margie tell about that last night?”

 

“No, she didn't.” She says through her teeth. “Can I please have the maps?”

 

“Course, sweetheart.” He says, leering. “Think it over though, there's plenty to do around this parts.”

 

“We will.” She thinks the paper creases in her grasp.

 

Regina walks away with her neck and face stiff with anger. She looks back at the booth, wanting to glare at the man from afar but finds him on the phone. Still, she narrows her eyes.

 

“Viejo cerdo.” Regina mutters as she walks back to her room.

 

She slams the door close and hears the bottles on the kitchen counter top rattle from the hit. Emma pokes her head from the bathroom and opens her mouth as if to say something.

 

“I got the maps,” Regina lifts them for her to see. “So we can get the hell out of this place.”

 

They’re almost in the middle of nowhere but with a day’s drive ahead of them they would out of the state of altogether. Time had been lost yesterday, Regina sees the almost spiral pattern they’d drawn out trying to go nowhere in particular. Emma traces the roads with her fingers, mouths the names of every city and town. Somewhere down the road maybe she’ll want to pick a spot, a place with a name that’s too long. It’s hard to tell why her mind has decided that it’s the thing to look forward to.

 

Even with a clear idea of what they’re doing it takes longer than they would have liked to be ready to leave. They’re both so careful when moving the bottles, the leftover oil and alcohol and placing them in the car. Emma even made sure they were at an easy distance away from their seats. It makes them both look like they’re in complete control of the situation, like every step has been thought out but Regina isn’t deluding herself. They’ve been relying on luck and that’s what they will continue to do. Through the bathroom door she can hear Emma turning the TV’s dials and settling in to watch a few more precious minutes of television as she showers.

 

Regina comes out checking her pockets,as if she could truly leave anything behind.

“If anyone has any information on the whereabouts of my daughter please come forward.”

 

It’s mother’s voice and Regina almost falls back against a wall. It’s a reflex at this point but she fights through it, legs weak and heavy as she manages to find the bed. Her mother’s face isn’t tear strained, it’s composed just enough to gather enough sympathy. Her voice breaks in the right places and she has her hand on her chest.

 

“Regina, if you’re out there, come home.” Mother says as if she believes Regina had chosen to run, deliberately left her behind to think the worse. It’s not as if she’s entirely wrong and yet the guilt isn’t overwhelming.  

 

A hotline number flashes right after her picture is shown, mentioning an eight hundred dollar compensation for a useful tip.

 

“Shit,” Emma mutters next to her. “Good that we’re leaving.”

 

The clerk, the leering clerk. The phone on his ear and his insistence for her to stay another night. It’s been too long. And the room is turning dark as her heart thumps louder.

 

“Regina?” Her hand is gentle on her arm, Emma doesn’t even nudge her.

 

The motel dog starts barking furiously outside, it growls like it wants to attack and is being held back.

 

Words catch between her cheeks when Emma is pulling her up and out the door.

 

The cyborg is standing here, sunglasses covering its eyes. Its blonde hair almost white under the Sun as it talks to the clerk, she can see him through the smudged car window. The tires screech under them and all she Regina can think, all she is capable of putting together, is that this isn’t happening because she’d heard her eggs sizzle this morning.

 

* * *

 

 

It all happens too quickly, her hands shake and Regina wonders how they’ll make it out alive. Speeding through a half empty road on a Sunday, the glass and metal of the bottles clinking behind them. It’s following them, because it was always going to follow them. Their engine roars as Emma presses on.

 

“We’re gonna have to start lighting them up.” Emma says with that odd coolness she gets in these moments. “Switch.”

 

She lets go of the wheel for Regina to take, and it’s mess of arms and legs before Emma’s in the back with their idea of firepower. Bullets fly so sharply that they shatter the back window. She sees Emma’s reflection barely dodging them, holding a lighter and a bottle to her chest. Regina hears her take a deep breath and then flames are on every mirror. It’s just the combustion of the chemicals, the terminator's car still runs at them. It just happens to look like hell is on their heels. Emma fires the few bullets they have left, and one or maybe all of them hit a wheel of the car. Regina wishes desperately for that to be enough but wishing never did her any good. Emma holds off on the bombs operating on instinct or memory when she finally throws them out the window.

 

“Ay, puta!” Emma shrieks and Regina’s grip on the wheel loosens when she registers sound of a bullet.

 

“What’s wrong?! Are you..”

 

“Son of bitch nicked me on the same spot as last time.” She replies lighting a bottle and throwing it with all her strength with her good arm.

 

It isn’t enough and they both know it when their eyes meet over the mirror.

 

“Regina, if..when..I don’t matter...you” Emma’s voice is just stronger than the wind

 

“Save it!”

 

Emma nods and uses up another precious bottle, la botella de suerte. The machine’s car veers out of control and just then, because there is no such thing as unbalance in the universe, theirs does too as Regina tries to avoid a tanker coming the other way. The sound of metal bending under her head and glass crusting itself into her skin are the first signs that her world is upside down.

 

“Emma, Emma!” Regina gets on her knees to find her unconscious with their cocktail bombs still in her hands. “Wake up, goddammit!”

 

Her eyes look as if they want to obey her voice but they just aren’t able. Regina looks up and seems the machine’s with its charred clothes, its half molten skin and the limp of its leg. It’s still coming for them.

 

“You idiot, you don’t get to do this now!” She hisses feeling Emma’s full weight as she struggles to drag her out of the car. “Get up!”

 

“...gina?” Emma mumbles when Regina pulls them both to their feet. “Go..you should, go.”

 

“We don’t have time for this!”

 

Even if it might turn her into a pillar of salt, Regina looks back. Sees that the terminator has taken the tanker for itself and plans on running them down. Emma’s arm is around her shoulders and Regina’s tightens her grip around her waist. The road is narrower as they move and there is a factory at the end of it. Regina wishes she were the Regina Mills of her son’s stories, she’d know what to look for, she’d know what to do with a wounded soldier slipping through her fingers. Mierda, she’d know.

 

“Run ahead.” Emma grits unlatching herself from Regina.

 

“If you think...”

 

“We don’t have time for this, remember? I’ll hold it off.” She has the nerve to actually smile at her, as if it’s the last time she’ll see her. “Ya, andaté!”

 

Regina wants to scream at her even as she runs knowing that the tanker is following behind and that Emma isn’t. She runs feeling the blood rush out of her and her head spinning. Then there’s scorching heat and the deafening sound of an explosion behind her. Her knees hit the pavement, she might hurl in relief, fear or a mix of the two. Regina forces herself to look at the fire, she smiles triumphant because a couple of adulterated hairspray cans had saved the world. It’s short lived, Regina quickly learns as a figure drops from the tanker’s cabin and makes its way through the flames. Piercing red eyes and a metal skeleton coming for her, unstoppable.

 

She runs because that is all she can do. Regina doesn’t stop when she feels the heat inside the factory sees nothing but metal, gears and grinds inside. Her eyes frantically search for somewhere to hide in this lifeless and grey place. Something grabs the back of her shirt and Regina doesn’t scream, not like she would have two days ago. She tries to rip herself away from it with whatever strength she has left.

 

“It’s me, it’s me.” Emma says, her hand resting on the small of her back as they climb up a flyover.

 

“No me asustes asi!” Her voice feels rough with all the broken bits still lodged in her throat.

 

There is no answer and she can hear the way Emma just wants to groan in pain as she holds her arm to her stomach, a can in her grasp. Their steps don’t do much to hide the sound of the terminator’s pistons as it makes it ways towards them, the way the metal clinks against metal. It shouldn’t be possible, everything about this screams unnatural, and for the first time a chill invades her as she thinks of wires and programming. They’re down there configured into a thing that wants her dead, that will stop at nothing because the right sequence of numbers told it to. All the air in her lungs leaves her when they hit a solid, concrete wall.

 

“Fuck.” Emma coughs out.

 

“We have to turn back.” Regina says leading the way until she sees it.

 

The silver of its metal looks dull out of the Sun and away from the fire. Regina can hear it thinking, processing how it might kill them without weapons at its disposal. Its standing by an escalator down to some presses. It’s waiting, knowing that there is a high probability they will try and get past it. Like  humans would, like it wouldn’t. She knows all this and Regina can still feel herself taking a step forward.

 

“What are you doing?!”  Emma grabs her hand, fingers tight around her palm.  “Go! I’ll…”

 

“If you say that to me one more time I swear to God!” Regina whispers back harshly.

 

“Together?” She says handing her their last chance for her to light up.

 

The terminator sees this and evaluates the threat as enough to move forward and prevent the explosion. There is the spark and then the cloth surrounding the can and throwing it to buy them a few seconds. It goes off and there is the sound of scrap falling around them, and she’s falling to the ground, Emma landing on top of her. She thinks they’ve won, that the cyborg is just spare parts and junk, but she hears the distinct sound of hydraulics still going despite it all. It’s the uncleaned blood on Emma’s temple that truly scares her, how heavy her body feels on top of hers. Like it had finally been too much for her.

 

“Emma!” This time not even her eyes follow her voice. Regina shakes her because her chest still rises, there has to be fight in her yet.

 

She lets out something like a whimper and Regina can’t bear the thought of her giving up. It’s fury that’s pulsating through because she isn’t waking up at the other side of this nightmare alone.

 

“Swan, levantate!” Regina says pushing her up. “On your feet soldier, on your feet! MOVE IT!” At this Emma’s hand finds hers again and lets Regina pull her along.

 

The two of them are slow in getting away from the half body of titanium that crawls after them, still trying to to fulfill its purpose. Its there, behind them as it always is, when they’re on their knees, keeping their heads down as they cross a metal press. If they make it out it then they can run again, they’ll be safe. Regina pulls Emma along until she’s out of the press, breathing out her mouth. As if the effort had almost cost her life. But Emma extends her good arm towards her, to get her away from the machine. Regina is still her mission. Then there is the cool strong metal grip of titanium and coltan around her ankle, inching her closer to death.

 

“Don’t let go!” Emma winces as she wills her injured arm to cooperate. She pulls and pulls as Regina kicks and kicks to get away. There is a moment, that is almost gone, but her ankle tugs free and she feels Emma’s chest against hers. They scramble to get away, the terminator’s hand still reaching for her, a breath away from her throat. It can’t win at the end of all this, it can’t. It seems like a ridiculous, a dying wish of someone who is still upset over the hand she’d been dealt. But then there’s Emma, Emma with her good arm reaching for her. Not minding the pain and Regina finds the thing she’d begged for. The controls to the press on the wall behind her, she bends her body until she think it might break and presses the green button. This time she welcomes the sound of moving parts and pressure moving through metal. The press falls on the terminator skull with all its weight and blue sparks of short circuits escape the metal of its skeleton. The sound of a too perfect brain being destroyed, slowly and surely. Regina sees the red of its eyes become nothing more than crushed crystal.

 

“We made it.” Emma says next to her, and it doesn’t even sound real to her.

 

Regina lets herself collapse next to her. “It’s over.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And you guys were worried I was going to kill Emma off. Suck it James Cameron. 
> 
> The song mentioned is "Mi vida es tu vida" (My life is your life) sang by Libertad Lamarque from the Argentinean musical "Besos Brujos"(Witch Kisses). Libertad Lamarque was Latin America's Julie Andrews, go check her out dudes.


	5. E3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't ask me where this takes place, it's not particularly important next to the angsty-fluff. Slight mention of the rotten lumber that is Robin Hood. At this point I start drawing from the Sarah Connor Chronicles more than I do the movies (even if chronologically that doesn't make sense. But time is a lie!)

Sal, that’s what Regina said the air smells like in this place. It comes from the water, the sea. Emma can see it from when they’re staying. The place is nothing like she’d ever seen, Regina had called it old when they first stepped in. Floors creak when they walk and the walls crack at night. “It’s just the house, se estira. Go back to sleep, Emma.” Regina had half said next to her. The mattress makes their back hurt but Emma doesn’t mind. Regina says that the bathtub and the the sea make up for it. There’s a promise with the water, maybe when her arm is all healed up they can go in. So that it won’t burn, so that she can move. Emma doesn’t tell her that she listens to the waves when she’s gone, listens when she rigs wires around the house. Listens when she walks to meet her outside the place with the books, where she works. Emma also doesn’t say that she watches the water and closes her eyes to the sound because she’s scared of it. It looks like the line at the end of the world when the Sun sets.

 

Emma waits on the steps outside where Regina works. She knows she doesn’t have to, just like Regina didn’t need this job. But there’d been a sign on a window in this place that was supposed to be only a stop and maybe they could quit running and stealing. Until...Emma never knows how to complete that thought. She rips at the grass growing from the cracks in the cements and twists a blade around her finger turns red and throbs against the green. It’s habit from this time, this time that shouldn’t be hers. The doorbell jingles as it opens and then closes. Regina’s balances her stuff and a paper bag as she closes locks the door.

 

“I got you something. Don’t eat it until...” Regina shakes the bag and Emma grabs it without a second thought. She’s learned to recognize the sound of sugar and the look grease stains. Emma is not about to waste any time. “Of course.”

 

“You give me these holes..”

 

“Doughnut holes.”

 

“And expect me not to eat them right away?”

 

“You’re right, your lack of self control is completely my fault.” Regina rolls her eyes as she goes down the steps with her. She looks like it’s been a good day. Emma always checks her face for that because she’s lost track of what bad days mean. Sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s only been fifteen days since they crushed the machine.

 

“Mhmm.” She sticks her hands in her pockets as she walks next to her. Words from her past hit her like a pile of junk on her chest.

 

_“It was the little things mom did in the end. Leche con azucar, bedtimes stories. Buying me a dessert I knew she couldn’t really afford.”_

 

Those small things is what have them walking feeling cold sand under their feet. This doesn't cost them anything and she’ll never get tired of it. Of the way her feet sink into the grey sand, how it sticks to her skin when it’s wet. She’s cold but she doesn’t care. Not when Regina is watching her run from the water, shaking her head. Emma yelps as she feels something sticking to her right foot.

 

“What the hell is that?!” She jumps and shakes her foot trying to shake it off but it’s no good.

 

“Just hold still for a second. Ridícula.” Regina is actually laughing as she picks off whatever nasty thing it is. “It’s seaweed, Sergeant.” She holds it up for Emma to see and puts it in her palm. It’s brown and wet and disgusting. But it’s _new_ so she squeezes until it’s mush.

 

“I don’t hate it.”

 

They walk back to the wooden house with the water hitting their ankles.

 

The next morning Emma’s fingers are black from the grease she’s been working with. It’s under her nails and she can feel it on her forehead where she’d wiped off her sweat. Until this time she hadn’t never really felt dirty. But now with baths and Regina’s soaps she understands the before and after of it. Regina is sitting at the table she’d dragged out to the shed. It smells of burnt and metal, it’s making her nose itch but Emma knows better than to complain.

 

“Ay! Mierda esta!” She looks over and finds Regina sucking on her finger and pushing away the table.

 

“Te quemaste?”

 

Regina looks at her like it’s the dumbest question she could’ve asked.

 

“Use the plyers I got you.” Emma tells her.

 

“They’re too big, they might damage the board.” Regina dips her finger in the water she’d been drinking. “Anyway, this is done. I’ll just put it together later.” She sounds like she has somewhere to be. But it’s Sunday. The days of the week matter to her now, they mean something. Emma tries not let disappointment drop in her stomach.

 

“Later?”

 

“When we come back.” Regina glances at her fingers and her greasy face. “It’s going to do you good.”

 

The sea is hitting their ankles again, Emma thinks la sal does something to her skin. Her skin that’s oily and covered in white stuff Regina had forced on her. “You’ll burn yourself red and get ideas about walking around naked again.”  She’d said dumping some on Emma’s nose. Regina goes deeper into the water, past the waves. Wearing black fabric that sticks to her skin, like Emma’s does. It fits her better, like a second skin when it feels tight and uncomfortable on her. She wonders if these are one of those little things she couldn’t afford. The water is making Regina’s hair curl up and she can only stand there with her toes clinging to the sand and watch her. Emma is a as out of place as she’s ever been. The Sun is in her eyes and sweat builds up at her neck. It’s nothing like the future and her heart races. She wants to turn back and get back to land, to the towels Regina had laid down. But then she sees Regina coming back to her and it isn’t so bad.

 

“Are you doing OK?”

 

Emma nods, wanting to reach for her.

 

“Just follow my lead.” Regina tells her carefully as sinks into the water.

 

The water is up to their chins and she can taste it, making her mouth dry. The almost healed wound in her arm stings but Emma doesn’t care. Not when Regina hand is on her shoulder.

 

“I need you to lie back.”

 

“What? Why?” It’s one of those things Emma doesn’t get.

 

“Just…” Regina’s hands are on her back, guiding her to where she’s supposed to be. “Stay with me.”

 

“OK.” Emma relaxes her neck, feels her hair cool with the water.

 

Not even being torn apart by time felt this strange. She weighs nothing and all she can see is cielo claro again. The few clouds that are up there, and the sea in her ears. Emma can hear the waves, how Regina barely moves against her.

 

“Now you can float.” Regina’s voice is muffled and her fingers begin slipping from her back. Emma stirs and the water burns her eyes as she feels herself sinking. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here.” Her hands push her up again and Emma meets her eyes. Recognizes the look in them, maybe from the photograph. Maybe from Henry Mills’s eyes.

 

“I know.” Something deep in her gut doubts that it can last. Maybe she’ll never leave but when the time comes Emma will have to go.

 

The thought drifts away when Regina takes her hand, teaching her how to jump with the waves. She doesn’t need her to, she’s a fast learner but Emma likes her fingers locked with hers. Likes what they make her believe in, even if she hates herself for it.

 

“You did this a lot?” Her feet kick as a wave lifts them up.

 

“Not as much as I would’ve liked. Daddy always said I had sal y fuego en las venas.”

 

“Sounds about right.” Emma can barely see her with the light reflected from below.

 

Regina splashes water at her and Emma smiles after she swallows of mouthful of it.

 

“Don’t try me, Swan.” Her eyebrow is raised and her chin is out.

 

“Or what?” She can’t help taunting her.

 

A bigger splash of water hits her and Regina throws back her head because she can’t hold in her laughter. _“It was really easy to tell when mom was happy. Her nose would scrunch up and she’d just forget for a while.”  He’d told her one night when neither of them could sleep._ He’s right, with Regina she’ll always know. Emma will know when she isn’t. It’s not today, not today. Because today Regina yelps when a fish swim past her ankles and Emma gets to say “It’s just a fish, Mills.” when she hopes it doesn’t come her way. Today when their mouths are dry Regina closes her eyes when she sips from a bottle. Today Emma hears her hum a song watching the water becoming orange with the light.

 

They walk back to the house dripping wet. Their shirts don’t look white anymore sticking to the black underneath. Her sandals are heavy with water and Emma has trouble walking in them. “Pareces pato” Regina says, forgetting for a second that Emma doesn’t know what she means. Streetlights light up as they get closer to the house, down to the cracked road and broken fence. Emma doesn’t have to wonder where the day went when she hears Regina’s keys slip between her fingers.

 

Her shower is short, something about quitarse la sal. Emma watches the sand pool at the mouth of the drain. The grey against the tub Regina had bleached white. When it’s all gone she pulls on the softest thing she owns, that red sweatshirt that always smells of bed. She crawls under the covers with her legs feeling heavy. Her skin feels tender, not really hurting, and her hair is stiff. It’s a good feeling, Emma could stay like this, right here, for the rest of time. With a chill down her legs, something she can’t really follow on the TV and Regina’s easy breathing next to her.

 

“Thank you.” Emma mumbles knowing she’s falling asleep.

 

“You looked like you need a bath.”  Regina’s eyes are closed. “You’re welcome.” She whispers.

 

* * *

 

The place with all the books has a funny smell to it. Sort of like the woods but not really. It’s inventory day, and that she remembers doing at base. It’s only counting, something she could help with. Regina had looked relieved when Emma hadn’t left after lunch, they have the place to themselves. They’re lying on the floor piles of books all around them and once in awhile Emma opens one and mouths the words as she goes. A lot she doesn’t understand, it isn’t how anyone she knows talks. No como ella y  Regina, not like Henry Mills. So closes each one, returns it to the pile before Regina notices what she’s been doing. There is big one that’s as big as half her lap. It has no words, just photos. The colors shock her, the purples and reds, pictures of trees, of the water. Places that don’t look like anything like this town. Somewhere that’s only sand and sky. It’s the World and Emma never thought it was this big. It’s all right there in a map that takes up two pages.

 

“Where are you from?” Emma asks Regina who has a pen in between her teeth.

 

“What was that?”  

 

“De donde sos?” She slides the book onto Regina’s lap and waits.

 

She puts the pen down and clear her throat as she looks at the map, blinking once or twice.

 

“I was born here,” It’s a small spot up North. “But my family is from here.” Her finger taps at an island in the middle of all the blue, lower in the map.

 

“Where do you think I’m from?” It’s a weird question to ask, she knows that. Emma is from the future and maps and lines don’t matter. But she’d like to know because she’s from outside a bunker and had made up her name.

 

“I think that, perhaps, you’re from right here.” Regina voice is softer now, not with pity. Never pity. “But where you came from, who knows? Maybe from this place.” It’s a long way from Regina’s family, a whole ocean away. She’s looking at Emma like she does sometimes before she goes to sleep, before she says good night.

 

“Right here is OK with me.” Emma decides and takes the book back from her.

 

“It’s a good a place as any.” Regina eyes the book and traces the world on the cover with her burned finger. “Do you think you’d like to see the rest of it one day?”

 

“One day, yeah.” Emma licks her lips and avoids looking at Regina. Because she makes it sound like Emma has future, like her life isn’t about to change soon. Like Emma gets to stay.

 

The doorbell is loud and makes Regina snatch her hand away. A man walks through the door and Emma searches his face for that dead look of a machine. She’s never seen him before. Her hand goes to the back of her pants where she keeps a gun just in case but he isn’t a threat. Not really. Emma wants him gone anyway. He stays, reading off from the books and throwing a glance or two their way.  Whoever he is, he’s quick to pick a book, she can tell it doesn’t really matter which one. Her jaw gets tighter watching him just stand there. He waves the book at them which makes Regina get up from the floor.  

 

“Slow day, huh?” He leans on the counter as she goes behind it.

 

“That’s why it’s inventory day.” Her eyebrows are raised as she takes the book from him.

 

“Did Walker just hire you?” He has a smile on his face and Regina returns it.

 

A cold creeps into her stomach, like it does when Emma is scared. She’s scared that she might be watching the future being set into motion. Terrified that this is what it’s meant to look like.

 

“Yes, he did. Around two weeks ago.” Regina looks over at her and Emma jura que she can hear her heart beating from all the way over there. “Do you want a bag?”

 

“No, it’s fine.”He keeps smiling, it makes her press the big book with the maps against her chest. “I could show you around town. Just ask for Rob down at Joe’s.”

 

“I’ll think about it.” Emma only hears the words because she can’t bear to look at her face. She doesn’t want to know if she means it.

 

After that Emma stops searching Regina’s face for signs of a good day. She doesn’t want to know, she’s afraid of knowing. Coward. It’s what she was told to be pushed to do something, drive the car that was supposed to distract the raiders. Climb up on an old radio tower, anything. Emma always swallowed her fears, she got it done. Not now, she can’t bear to see a smile on Regina’s lips and wonder how much longer she has. She still waits by the steps outside her work. She can tell Regina watches her when she’s walking in the shallows, away from her. It’s better this way, it’s what Emma has to believe. This time had her thinking she was allowed to have anything beyond a mission. There is no way to stop what’s coming and Emma has to accept it.

 

Not that she wants to. She remembers his face even if there’d been nothing special about it. How he had just stood and thought he had a right to Regina. Emma hates, she just hates.Hates that he has a place in this town. Hates he probably has a family, the name they gave him. Hates that he belongs in this time. Thinks that he doesn’t mix up his words, doesn’t need things explained to him. Doesn’t have his knees give in because it’s all too much for him. He doesn’t have to hold in his gasps, his eyes probably don’t get all watery when looks at anything green.  At night she thinks that maybe she was supposed to die, that maybe Regina wasn’t supposed to save her back there. The machine and the metal should’ve taken her. It would’ve been easier.

 

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Regina is lying on her side. It’s late and she sounds tired. Like she’d been holding this in too long.

 

“Nothing’s wrong.” Emma mutters back not even surprised she’d known she’d been faking sleep.

 

“Emma…Fine”She sighs and Emma hopes she doesn’t turn to look at her. “Don’t wait for me tomorrow.”

 

That’s it, she thinks. Tomorrow is the day it all changes, where time picks up again. And Emma is lost, or will be like she should have been weeks ago.

 

Emma spends the day loading their weapons, checking what munitions they have. Making sure that wire around the house is tight as can be. That the electric box Regina had made is flashing green, not red. Emergency bags in the car. Anything to keep her from thinking about him. Rob with the face. Walking on the sand where they’d walked, Regina laughing. Laughing so hard, scrunching up her nose. Looking happy. She wants to call him ladrón but doesn’t know what the hell he is actually stealing from Emma. Sweat drips from all over her as she works on the car that has nothing wrong with it. Or didn’t until she’d slashed a hose this morning. Everything needs to be up and running for Regina, for when Emma has to go. Because she doesn’t belong, she’s always been all wrong here. But she’ll leave things right. She’d done what she’d set out to do, saved Henry Mills’s mother.

 

“Why do I always find you covered in sweat and grime?” Regina says coming up behind her. Emma drops the wrench she’d be been holding straight on her foot. She bites the inside of her cheek.

 

Regina is carrying two large paper bags, she can see something leafy sticking out from one. Her purse barely on her shoulder.

 

“Aren’t you going to help me, Swan? She asks clearing her throat.

 

“Yeah, sorry.” She feels her big toe throbbing as she moves to take the bag that looks the heaviest.

 

“Walker paid me today. I thought it was about time we splurged.” Regina tells her over her shoulder going up the wooden steps and into the house.

 

Emma doesn’t get what is happening. Why she’d gone to get food alone when there’s plenty to eat en el refri. But she follows, like she always does. Regina is rolling up her sleeves by the kitchen sink.

 

“Límpiate, you’re helping this time.” She orders like her son and doesn’t even know it.

 

She brushes under her nails, uses hot water until her fingers are pink. Coward, staying longer than she needs in the bathroom. But it doesn’t take long for all the smells to reach her, more and more things that don’t exist in the future. Emma feels her mouth watering stepping into the kitchen.

 

“You’re going to peel the skin off,” Regina points at seven yellow looking things. Papas, she thinks they’re called. “Like this, see?” She’s careful with it, the knife barely even cutting into, when she’s done the skin looks like a coil in the sink.

 

Emma’s aren’t as neat, but her grip on them is good and that at least gets the job done. When the sink is full of bits and pieces her shoulders have relaxed into it, feels the heat coming from the stove. When she looks at Regina she’s tucking hair behind her ear, her tongue between her teeth. And she forgets, just like that. She forgets that she was gearing up to leave, that the wires are all secure and that the weapons are loaded. It’s so easy to give herself to this, like time isn’t catching up with them. If she could have smelled all this back in the future Emma could’ve come up hundreds of new colors. They’re all up in the air here, lying there on the kitchen table with names she can’t remember.

 

“Taste.” Regina comes up behind her with a spoon. It’s a reflex, the way she turns her head to meet her halfway, still holding the knife in her hand. “How is it?”

 

Emma has no sense of what’s going on in her mouth other than an explosion and she doesn’t really know what to do or say. So she licks her lips and smiles.

 

“Oh, why am I even asking you? You’d eat the thing whole just like this.” Regina rolls her eyes with a sigh. It hadn’t been about the food at all.

 

“Yeah. Can I?”

 

“No, don’t be greedy.” She replies standing over the stove and adding something here and there to it.

 

Emma feels her toes curling over the wooden floor as she takes a bite out of everything. Her brain can’t keep up with it, she hasn’t tried something like this in her whole life. She thinks it’s stuffed roasted pepper, something ending in an a and a thick white sauce she never wants to stop eating. Regina looks at from time to time, she’s pleased. Emma can tell, she’s glad she still can.

 

“This why you didn’t want me to wait outside the book place?” She asks with half her plate cleared. Emma thinks she would’ve been in the way, somehow.

 

Regina opens her mouth and then closes it, like she always does when she changes her mind. It must be the heat but her cheeks are darker.

 

“Yes, actually,” She takes a sip of her water, still looking flushed. “It wouldn’t have been much of a surprise if you’d come along.”

 

“Surprise?” Emma asks because she’s lost her again. It’s means something important, she knows that.

 

“It’s supposed to...well, it doesn’t really matter.” If Regina had wanted to she would’ve explained it to her, like she always does. But this time she looks relieved, like maybe she’d made a mistake and Emma’s wrongness here had made up for it.

 

“I like it.” She can feel how small her smile is and how little it lasts.

 

“ I know _that_.” Regina laughs looking at her plate.

 

Emma can see how Regina thought this would fix things, whatever she think has gone wrong.  She can also see how it’s thin and weak and could break with a push. Emma knows because she’d made this way. Ay Emma, don’t be stupid, she can hear more than two voices telling her. If she could help it, she would. It’s like every time she has the option to avoid disaster she jumps right into it.

 

“Did you see anyone today?” Her throat is burning but she had to ask, she has to know.

 

“No, to be honest I don’t know how that bookstore even stays open. I don’t think anyone in this place even reads.” Regina had missed the question altogether. Emma could stop this, let it be.  

 

“What about that Rob man?” She chews on what’s left of her roasted pepper, looks anywhere but her face.

 

“No, I…” Regina’s voice drops suddenly. “Why are you asking me that, Emma?”

 

She shrugs daring to glance at Regina. Her jaw is tight and her eyes are set on hers.

 

“You think _he_ is Henry’s father? Is this what this is?” Regina sounds like she’ll tear her to shreds.  

 

“He could be.” Emma mutters, doesn’t say that the timing is right. That the Rob man is just as tall as Henry Mills, but that his face is all wrong.

 

There’s the screech of wood on wood Emma hadn’t known before and Regina getting to her feet. “Don’t you ever talk to me about this again. Me entiendes?” She slams the door on her way out.

 

Out of instinct more than anything she follows her, to find her standing by the broken fence looking out to the water. Her skin turns hard with the nightwind so she crosses her arms as she goes up to her.

 

“Regina...I…”

 

“Don’t. Just don’t. Not after weeks of you pretending nothing was bothering you.” She moves away from Emma, like she’s never done. And all she wants to do is fix it. “I can’t even look at you right now!”

 

“What can I do? Please..I…”

 

“Go back in the house, Emma.” She whispers but it sounds sharp, she could bleed from it.

 

“But…”

 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Regina’s voice hasn’t softened. “I just need to be alone right now.”

 

She’s done as she’s told, because she’d gone and fucked this up. Over Rob with the face, barely a someone, a nobody who still has a better chance of staying. Emma is lower than a nobody. It’s not like she can say any of this to Regina, explain that time is running short. That it ends, that everything does. That according to all she knows about Regina’s future, she shouldn’t be here. Instead she paces inside the house that feels too small now, washes their dirty dishes. Just like the rest of today, anything to stop thinking about him or anyone who might come after. She’s scrubbing a pan clean when Regina does come in and heads straight for the bathroom. It’s a while till she comes out, steam behind her and hair sticking to her forehead. Looking at her dressed for bed Emma remembers how small she is. How afraid she should be.

 

It’s quiet for a long time, Regina trying to read a book in bed and she’s curled in their only armchair already trying to find how best to sleep, watching something with no sound from the TV. Not that she’ll be able to sleep, she’ll be lucky to even close her eyes tonight. There’s a click by the bed and the lights are off. That spot in her lower back is starting to hurt, and there’s that regular chill on her legs but it’s not like it matters. Emma had earned this and Regina is still furious, she can feel her burning from across the room.

 

“Are you done sulking and coming to bed or not?”  She asks cutting through the sound of waves.

 

Emma can’t get up fast enough, feeling a tingling down her back. She’s careful getting underneath the covers, avoids  touching her. Turning on her side away from Regina is the best thing she can do for her, so that she doesn’t look at her. She hadn’t wanted to, after all. Regina is here because that’s how fate had worked out for them. Just that, it’s easier to believe that. Coward. But then Regina’s arms are around her, her face buried in her neck. And fuck, she could just cry. It’s the first time, and Regina isn’t even big enough. No le alcanzan los brazos and yeah, she could just cry. It’s like everything about this time that isn’t hers, she hadn’t known she wanted it until she had it.

 

“Regina, I’m..sorry. I’m..”

 

“Go to sleep. It’s OK. We’re OK.” She feels the words warming her skin and closes her eyes.

 

* * *

 

Regina’s awake, thinks she has been for a while. Emma also knows that Regina knows she’s not asleep because her heart is fast against her back.  She wants to ask if it’s always like this, pulse always running like an engine when she’s awake. But Emma knows better than to ask, doesn’t want to push her luck. The morning is sort of blue, the way it gets here when the Sun is close to coming up. The house that had looked so small last night looks big again, everything in one room with no walls.  It’s more than Emma had ever had, less than what Regina is used to. If it bothers her, she never says it. That’s the thing with Regina, she’ll call someone at a gas station imbécil, will say the eggs at some stop are burnt and maybe unhatched at the same time, but she doesn’t say a word about the roof over the heads.

 

Her healed arm is sore from all her weight so it’s up to her to end this. Emma rolls on her back and all that does is make Regina pull her arm from under from her. They’re warm where they’re touching, and half of Emma’s body is numb. Regina’s chin is on her shoulder, not looking at her and quiet. She’s mad but not at Emma. Maybe she doesn’t have the words for what she’s feeling, even if she knows thousands of them. Emma can understand that, it’s hard to find anything that makes sense when you know your future. When you know that time tears itself apart to make things happen. Things you can’t control. Good things, bad things. They could have this, make the morning last as long as it can.

 

Emma should have know she’d called it with her thoughts, mala suerte. Bad luck sounds loud and all over the house. It’s the alarm from the box Regina had made, that’s probably flashing red. The one she’d burned her fingers for and spent her free time putting together. The noise is gonna make her ears bleed. They’d been found again, the wires around the house had been tripped. A machine is outside, and should be charging  in. She jumps from bed and grabs for the shotgun under it. Sees that Regina is doing the same for the weapons in their closet. There’s no point in trying to jump through any window, it’ll catch up with them. Emma bursts through the front door, the wood rough on her soles, ready to fire and let go. But the machine is lying there in the ground, it’s head on the wire. Its fingers twitching, and it’s eyes open and red.

 

It’s big, like machines usually are. Has a square chin and a dead look on its face. It looks like a man, any other man that could be from this town. The cap that had been covering his head had fallen to the side, the boots he’s wearing look old. Stolen, always stolen. How long did it take it to find them? How did it find them, when no one knew them, where their names didn't exist? Doesn’t matter, because it will get it up if it they don’t move.

 

“Emma?” She asks with explosives in her arms and her hair sticking up at the back. “Why isn’t it…”

 

“Don’t know, don’t care. We’re leaving before it comes to.”

 

“It’s probably the electrical charge in the wires.” Regina says going down the steps to where it’s lying on the ground. “It could’ve hit the right spot and the system is rebooting.”

 

“Regina, we need to go!” Emma grips her shotgun tighter and her feet wanting to move the opposite way.

 

She’s not listening at all, almost dropping the explosives as she kneels down next to it. Emma has never seen her like this, unafraid of it broken down. Like a machine hadn’t punched through glass and grabbed her, like they hadn’t escaped the bullets together. Her fingers stretch the machine’s eyelids, like she’s checking for life. No one in the future even gets so close to a machine, like she wants to understand it instead of just blasting it to hell. Regina traces its scalp, thinking she’ll find something. And Emma has never been more afraid of anything, it’ll wake up and grab her by the throat. Stab her with the knife that’s still in its hand.

 

“Please…” Emma begs her shaking her shoulder.

 

“Wait,” Regina takes the knife that would have killed her and cuts through its scalp. “I think I found the CPU.”

 

There’s metal under the artificial everything of it, coltan and titanium. It looks like it can be opened.

 

“We don’t know how long we have!” Emma placing her shotgun between its eyes, knowing it won’t be enough.

 

“Fine,” Regina replies like she’s in the wrong, like it isn’t completely fucking crazy to be kneeling next to a terminator. “We’re taking its head.”

 

“What?!”

 

Instead of answering she goes about lying all the explosives around its neck. Empties the gunpowder from the munitions she had with her. Her eyes look yellow with the one flame. She grabs Emma’s hand to run for cover. It’s not like nitric acid and the small can bombs from more than a month ago. Not more fire than a blast, this explosion makes the ground under them shake and her ears ring. Emma is not sure if they’re still here and in one piece. Before she counts her fingers and toes Regina is slipping away from her, running towards it.

 

“Qué putas?” Emma mutters not even hearing herself saying the words.

 

The smoke begins to clear up, enough for her to see Regina bending over to pick up its head. Just the gray of the metal, nothing human about it. She’s careful with it, like she’s cares about what might happen to it. It gives a chill down her back, one that she ignores as she climbs into the car and starts it. Regina gets in and lays the head on her lap, blank red eyes looking right at them.

 

“Go, go!”

 

Emma does with the pedals hard on and hot on her naked feet.  They’re out of the town, away from the house near the water before she knows it. Out in the road again, like the past weeks hadn’t existed at all. Time tore itself apart again, because of  Regina. Always because of her.

 

“Slow down, we don’t want to get pulled over.” Regina tells her, looking away from its head.

 

“OK.” Emma doesn’t know what else to say. She can pretend she’s too busy keeping with the road to answer with more than one word.

 

“Where do you think we should go?” Regina asks, not falling for her act.

 

“Somewhere hot.” Emma says only thinking of the cold that won’t leave her body.

 


	6. R3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: non-graphic descriptions of menstruation 
> 
> After this chapter, updates might be a little late as this is the last completed chapter I have. I played myself so hard with scheduling. So apologies for that!

They have reached the desert, just a town or two away from where they’ll settle. This is Emma’s somewhere hot. Sitting here in a car that’s barely cool while Emma pumps gas into it she wonder how long they have in this new somewhere. It may be ridiculous to dwell on details, on questions from a day ago instead of the metal head sitting in the backseat. Regina can still see that same expression on Emma’s face, the defeated one she’d had when she’d shrugged as an answer. Then she’d mumbled something about a father and Regina hadn’t wanted to hear it. How dare she remind her how this, whatever it is they’re doing, cannot last. Their days are numbered, they’ll run out like the bills in their pockets. Except they’ll never be able to make or steal more days like those by the shore and the old wooden house. Now there’s only barren land waiting for them.  Suddenly there’s a loud click by her window.

 

“Five dollars for the picture, miss?” A young boy with a toothy smile shakes the black off her polaroid.

 

Regina feels her heart clench looking at him and she knows she can’t say no. She reaches for the spare change in the cupholder and hands it to him.

 

“You’re very talented.” She tells him without even looking at the photo.

 

“Thanks!” He says scampering off to the next gas pump.

 

Emma gets in the car, wiping her hands on her dirty jeans.

 

“We’re good to go.”  She says in a way that makes her think that it’s how she always did in the future, before leaving base.

 

Regina doesn’t really think about it when she hands her the polaroid to start the engine.

 

“What’s this?” Emma asks quietly.

 

“An expensive photo.” She says off-offhandedly and regrets it when she glances at Emma. She’s thumbing the white edges of the polaroid, looking she’d just seen a ghost.

 

“What is it?” Regina knows that it’s best to say it casually, like she had barely noticed.

 

“It’s...it’s nothing.” Emma answers like there isn’t enough air. Regina should say something but she feels un nudo en la garganta seeing her sitting so still. She’s holding onto the photo like she’s afraid she might lose it, eyes wide and parted lips.

 

“Keep it,” It’s what she eventually says feeling the desert Sun on her arms. “If you want to, that is.” It may be the wrong thing to assume and Regina has the feeling that this another one of those invisible lines she crosses sometimes.

 

“I do.” She says quickly, as if she’s insulted that Regina might think otherwise.

 

Her heart beats faster when she smiles for the first time since they’d left the house. Regina wants to think of time of small moments, maybe ruptures to come to be because they’d gone left instead of right. It’s better than to  see a never ending straight line running from her birth to the fire that’s coming. The fire she wants to forget, even if it’s the one responsible for Emma sitting next to her putting on cheap red-rimmed plastic sunglasses she’d taken two gas stations back. Perhaps if she had ever bothered to pray or believed in anything she could make this car exist outside a line, pretending that seconds are not passing and that they’re not getting older. But the truth is, and Regina has always needed and hated the truth, that they are. They’re heading somewhere and one day everything will finally be unavoidable. But not today.

 

Today looks like a town down South, yellow and orange. Regina, who had grown up with the cold of Maine and learned to hold her breath in the Caribbean, feels she could dry up here. But Emma has her eyes set on the rocks, the dust and seems to just fit with it. There is an air recognition in her eyes, this place won’t make her knees buckle and her eyes water.

 

“Is this what your time looks like?” She’s taken the habit of asking frightening questions.

 

“Some of it. If you got far enough away from Skynet, maybe it was like this.”  Emma lights up a bit. “There was a really bad sandstorm once…” Regina can tell always tell when it’s the beginning of a story about her son.

 

“Sounds like you got lost in it.”

 

“We did. It was just three of us, scouting new territory. Then it hit us,” And she sounds almost fond of the memory. “But Henry Mills said it’d be OK, we were together.”

 

Regina always gets this flashes of pride for a son she hasn’t raised yet, for already being better than she is. She has no doubt about it and that’s when fear always sinks in, when she wonders how she could possibly do it.

 

“It was alright in the end.” And Regina can hear the smile in her voice. “Besides la arena que tenía en el culo.”

 

“I figured.” She says nodding in her direction.

 

Emma snorts realizing that she’s living proof that these stories always work out.

 

Regina feels like something has lifted out here, even if her whole body aches for a bath, she feels lighter on her shoulders. The radio glitches as it adjusts to new stations and settles on something that sounds older. It’s a song from when she was ten, Daddy had muddled the words whenever he sang it but she never minded it. Her lips move to it on instinct and Emma’s hand goes to turn up the volume. It’s her version of singing along, Regina knows that and thinks about reaching for hand, doesn’t want to question her reasons. Reasons that become unclear and complicated every night.

 

* * *

 

 

The town is one of those she would’ve sworn she wouldn’t be caught dead in, oddly perfect that way. It’s one of those on the road places, dismissed as nothing more than a truckstop. They picked it sitting on the hood of their car, not daring to leave it for too long. Regina had spread out free newspapers between them with rental listings. Emma had tapped her finger on a blurry black and white photo of a house in the middle of nowhere. Low rent and probably too old to be comfortable.

 

“What about this one?” She’d asked with chocolate at the corner of her mouth.

 

Regina had agreed because Emma had asked.

 

They’re here, the first real place Emma had picked from a whole world. Arriving at the house just shy of five minutes late than the time Regina had promised the woman on the phone. The house has seen better days, the whitewash on the stone is practically grey with dust and somehow it’s smaller than she thought it would be. It’s surrounded by dirt that looks almost red to her,alone in it.  This is home, for as long as it can be. A small woman with brown desert dry skin emerges from the front door to greet them.

 

“You Reina?” She asks shielding her eyes from the Sun and Regina nods in recognition of her new name.

 

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Lucas.” Regina stretches her hand with the smile she’d learned to give when she turned thirteen.

 

“Yeah, yeah. And you are?” She’s speaking to Emma who looks frozen in place.

 

“Emma. I’m Emma.” Her hand is stiff when she gives it, fearing that Mrs. Lucas  will rip it off.

 

The woman huffs like she can sense something, smell it off them.

 

“Well, come in. I don’t have all day.” Mrs. Lucas turns on her heel and leads the way.

 

The house is what Regina had expected it to be. Bare white walls and a bright orange tile floor. It’s cool inside, the Sun miraculously kept at bay. There is some pieces of furniture here and there, they look old and fragile but she won’t point it out. The windows are lined with wood and the ceiling is maybe a hair too low. Mother would hate it, hate what it reminds her of. It makes the house grow on her. Emma has her hands in her pockets, eyes counting the windows and doors. She knows that, it’s what she always does when they’re somewhere new. There is a sigh of relief behind and that’s enough for Regina.

 

“Rent’s two hundred a month, services not included.” Mrs. Lucas tells standing by the refrigerator that sounds like it will keep them up at night.

 

“And the lease?” Regina stands as straight as she can, like she was taught.

 

“Let’s cut the crap, here. You want to pay in cash month to month, right?”

 

She keeps her jaw from dropping as she feels Emma’s knee nudging against her own to remind her that she should speak.

 

“Well, yes. That would be ideal.”

 

“You two look like runaways if I ever saw one. But I don’t ask questions.” Mrs. Lucas seems all too pleased with herself and Regina could almost like her.

 

“You girls got jobs?”

 

“Yeah, we keep busy.” Emma surprises her by replying so smoothly, like she’s mastered this time.

 

“If you ever feel like you’re not _busy_ enough let me know. Could use a waitress.” She slides the keys across the scratched up kitchen table.

 

“You’re giving us the house?” Regina asks feeling something is amiss, but then again most things feel like that these days. “It’s that easy?”

 

Mrs. Lucas smiles with far too many teeth. “You’re the only one who called.  No one’s crazy enough to want to live this far out. Nadie tiene los huevos.”

 

They should it take it as warning but it only makes Emma laugh in a short breath and Regina take the keys into her hand, accepting the challenge.

 

“Good.” She gives them one final look as she walks away from them. “Rent’s due at the end of the month. There’s no hot water, don't shower and wash the dishes at the same time,and I'd check the mattress for scorpions before bed.” The door shuts with little more than a click.

 

It's easy to settle into a new place when she has in the world is contained in a bag. It's as simple as dropping it on the bed, one that has only a white cotton sheet covering it. This bedroom is in the back of the house, facing the open desert, it’s not the only one in the house. The other one looks out into the road and has yellow curtains, to give some illusion of homliness.  Regina knows about the bare twin bed in it and still hopes that Emma will come in and claim the side closest to the door. It's something the unstoppable gears in her mind can't process entirely, that hope that given a choice Emma will pick _this_. Regina has tried to make sense of it for weeks, all those nights listening to her breathing slowly matching the waves. Even the nights when Emma never got that point and just lied there, silent and away from her.

 

Emma is clumsy coming into the room, balancing her bag and every weapon she could carry, by the looks of it. She's glad and feels herself sighing in relief watching her place the bag on the bed,without a second thought. But it's Emma carefully removing the polaroid from her flannel’s pocket and placing it on the bedside table that makes Regina sit to compose herself. Her heart races and she feels it might hum given a minute or two.

 

“The...um.. _thing_ is still in the car.” Emma says making little effort to hide her distaste for the terminator’s head. She had even stuck it in a greasy paper bag and practically thrown it over her shoulder.

 

“I’ll go get it.” Regina gets to her feet as Emma begins hiding weapons under the bed.

 

The head is heavier than she remembers, still in its bag. It feels dead, that’s the only way she can describe it, odd as it is. Regina is already thinking of tearing apart, of slowly unscrewing, lining up each piece and figuring out just how it can kill her. Wires, gold-lined chips, silicone, metal and metal.  She stashes it in the broom closet in the kitchen, knowing Emma would never even open it.  Out of habit more than anything she opens the refrigerator, empty like the one back at the old wooden house isn’t. Regina thinks of the tomatoes that will grow mushy, the strawberries with white mold and the milk that will become sour.She also thinks of the last bits of her pay being used up sooner than she thought and how stealing means running again. Running when they just got to Emma’s first somewhere. It won’t do.

 

* * *

 

The uniform is a particularly nasty shade of pink, probably best suited for table cloths in a little girl’s tea-set. The fabric isn’t much better, but Regina tries to smile as best she can at Granny’s diner by the roadside.

 

“No smile, no tip. That’s how it usually goes with these assholes.” Rubí had told sliding off a bar stool pushing the corners of her mouth with her middle fingers before walking over to a table.

 

She hates waitressing, that’s the truth. Hates the coffee burn she’d gotten on her first day, the ball of ice cream a five year old with uninterested parents had hurled at her apron. The worst are the tips, the spare change they dare to leave behind. The nickels, the dimes, if she gets a quarter she’s supposed to feel grateful.

 

“Hey sweetheart, can I get a refill?” A man calls from a booth by the window. He looks like a nickel and a penny type of man.

 

“Of course.” Regina can feel her cheeks ache as she walks over with the coffee pot.

 

“Reina, huh?” He says pointing at her name tag. “What’s that? Italian?”

 

“Spanish.” Her shoulder tense, bracing herself for whatever nickel and penny man will say about her.

 

“Don’t matter, sure sounds pretty to me,” He looks up at her with puke green eyes. “Pretty like you.”

 

She looks over at Rubí shrugging her shoulders at her and mouthing “sorry”. Regina suddenly can’t decide who, if given the chance, she’d murder first.

 

“Thank you.” She says watching the black of the coffee pour into his mug, wishing she could pour it on his lap instead. Regina gives him the smile mother had forced on her when she hadn’t looked like a girl anymore.

 

It disappears when she’s walking back to the counter, feeling that vein in her forehead throbbing.

 

“Frank’s mostly harmless, you’ll get used to it.” Rubí tells her coolly, she isn’t her like her grandmother. A laugh always seems to be playing on her lips and the shine of her eyes seems to pop against the  deep color of her skin. “I’ve spat on his club sandwich once or twice. Don’t tell abue.” That admission lifts Regina’s spirits somewhat and it makes the forty minutes before her break somewhat bearable.

 

The kitchen is too hot when she goes in and she is determined to be done quickly. To slice the onions, get enough of a crisp on the hash and the meat sizzle on the grill. Regina looks up for a second and sees Mrs. Lucas watching her with quirked eyebrow, like she always does when she’s at the grill. But she says nothing, like she’s saving it for another day. Her plates are always neat, never too greasy and there’s always enough. A few days of practice is all it took to get her to balance them on one hand to pull the kitchen door open.

 

There’s the Sun and there’s Emma with her half dirty face and the red bandana that keeps her hair clean and together. The poster child for aspiring grease monkeys everywhere in overalls and looking she used all the handsoap the carshop has in its one bathroom. Emma practically jumps when she catches sight of Regina’s balancing act and takes one off her hands.

 

“Rough morning?” Emma asks her easing herself back on the floor.

 

“No, just the usual.” Regina knows it’s a half truth. She dabs away at the sweat on her forehead before taking the bottle iced tea Emma hands her.

 

It’s hot under the tin roof that connects the diner with the carshop and still it’s the best spot for lunch. Regina refuses to eat at the diner or at the table with the rest of the mechanics, she doesn’t like prying looks. Doesn’t want raised eyebrows or ears too keen on listening, questions on the tip of their tongues. Even if it’s the floor is rough under them and the Sun too burning, it’s better when it’s just them.

 

“Hey Swan, think fast!” Audrey says landing a not so gentle punch on her shoulder.

 

Emma half chokes on her hash as she manages to bark out a laugh. “Thought we settled it, Ramírez.”

 

“Says the loser.”

 

Regina watches the exchange feeling like an intruder. Something hot and stiffening runs down her back and her grip tightens around her fork. The only thing she has left to do is stab at her meat and avoid the urge to just get up and leave.

 

“Ah, guess better leave ya to your lunch.” Audrey’s tone has turned awkward as she balances herself on her heels. “Hey Reina, tell Rubí to save me a shake before she closes up tonight, a’right?”

 

“Of course.” Regina finds the words being grit through her teeth for no particular reason. She’s been glaring she realizes as Audrey walks away. “Seems like you two are close.”

 

Emma shrugs and avoids her gaze. “Reminds me of someone back…”

 

“Home?” It shouldn’t be painful, lots of things shouldn’t be.

 

“Where I came from.” She says like Emma knows what it is she needs to hear. Her eyes finally look up at her and she smiles at her as if it’s the first time.

 

Regina feels whatever had come down on her drift away and be replaced with guilt. If anything she should be relieved Emma had found something to do instead of being cooped up in the house alone, that she’d found a place where she seems to fit in. She should be. But for now she’s only glad to feel her bare knee grazing Emma’s covered one and to hear her content sighs as she eats.  

 

It’s what lunch always is for her, feeling she can breathe again. Even if the smell of cooking oil and grease are mixed up in the air and if her feet ache inside too-thin shoes. It’s a welcome change from the eyes of too many strangers and some that are becoming familiar. It’s part of the day, part of what has become her life. Every night they go home kicking up dust as they walk, Emma with her hands in her pockets. Regina thinks that maybe if they swung next to hers, if they touched by accident she could hold them. Just out there in the open, less than a block away from the diner. When there is no reason to, nothing to run away from, no waves to jump. But then there’s the future to think about, a would be father to come and she feels dirty. It’s like clockwork at this point, she rushes to the bathroom every night. Stands under the cold spray of water and washes away the day from her skin. Those eyes that follow her in the dinner, low voices that ask for her name. She scrubs and scrubs until is red, until she doesn’t smell like the day she’s had.

 

It’s when Emma is sleeping that she sits at the kitchen table with borrowed tools and picks at the terminator’s head. Copies its design in a notebook, pulls chips apart and sees it cold logic laid out front of her. How easily each piece fits with the other, how a wire connected two and two together. At least some things still made sense to her, at least she can pull this apart and understand. She can’t do that with the things that are coming, Regina doesn’t know how to piece them together.

 

“No vas a dormir?”  Emma always asks her rubbing her eyes as she comes into the kitchen after midnight.

 

“Ya voy, in a minute.” She says looking at her in her barefeet and pillow hair, wishing desperately she knew where to place to her. Emma with all her edges, rough and smooth. No matter how many times Regina looks at it, how she arranges the parts of mother, father, son and Emma it doesn’t quite fit. Regina isn’t willing to cut her out to have it make sense. She _won’t_ , there has to be a way that lines up as neatly as a cyborg’s brain on the kitchen table.

 

Come the morning shift and men asking for cream for their coffee and Regina hasn’t figured it out. She never does in these days that are all the same. Every time heavy steps come in through the door, every time a truck is parked outside she wonders if this might be her son’s father. Bile goes up her throat and she can’t help but hate all of them for no good reason. Especially the ones that look at her kindly, who say excuse me and don’t ask about her name. Those who try to be nice, who think that given time they might get to know her. Regina doesn’t smile anymore, barely manages to keep the scowl off her face. Her answers come in mums and her tips turn into just pennies.

 

“Reina, get in here!” Mrs. Lucas calls her from the kitchen.

 

Regina stuffs her pad into her pocket and straightens her shoulders as she walks into the kitchen.

 

“Now listen, Julio just decided to follow some gringa up to New York. Which means I’m short a pair of hands in the kitchen. Think you can handle it?” She says it in a way that it’s not a question.

 

“I think so, yes..” Regina answers unsure as to what really brought this up.

 

“Good! It was either this or firing you because you’re scaring the white off the men.”

 

Regina laughs, shocked and grateful all at once. “Mrs. Lucas, I don’t think I can scare the white off anyone.”

 

“You sure as hell are trying though.”

 

She smiles  because she can’t deny it.

 

* * *

 

 

Things seem easier now that she works in the kitchen, now that she deals with sharp things and fire. It feels to Regina that she has somehow managed to cheat fate somehow, choosing to turn her back on any man she’s supposed to meet. She could be proud of it, the way she’s defying things to be, if it weren’t for the guilt and inevitability of it all. Regina decides to hold her head high while she still can, take whatever small victories she gets. This Saturday evening feels just like that, not nearly enough but she clings to it. The sky borders between blue and violet, the last of the Sun is almost gone. There’s the weight of a rifle set against her shoulder and her sight set on old paint cans some ten meters away. Emma isn’t too precise about these things but always keen teaching her anything.

 

“I can’t even see the damn thing in this light.” Regina says feeling her cheek against the cold metal of the rifle.

 

“Doesn’t matter. Just give it your best shot.” Emma replies eagerly and Regina scoffs. “You done good so far, right?”

 

“That’s when I could actually see the target.”

 

She laughs in a way that tells Regina that she’s shaking her head behind.

 

“Regina, come on.” Emma comes stand behind her, as if that will make her see how the cans are being swallowed by the night. She can feel her breathing against her neck and it makes her pull the trigger and fall back against her. “Squeeze next time.”

 

“I hit one, Sergeant. I suggest you go have a look.” She says trying not to think how familiar Emma’s steadying hands feel on her waist.

 

“Sos imposible.” She says and Regina doesn’t have to look at her to know she’s smiling. Emma lets go of her and walks over and holds up the can for her to see. Small victories.

 

The violet of the sky turns deeper and deeper until there’s only the white of the moon and the stars that will become brighter. They’re lying on top the roof of their car, they’ll wake up with cramped backs. Regina already knows that they’re here for the night, judging by the way Emma doesn’t hold back her gasps as each new thing in the sky becomes darker. God knows for how long she’s wanted to do this, just lie back and look up. This time there are no tears brimming her eyes, like the shock of this time has worn off and the wonder is setting in.

 

“They have names, right?” She whispers like she understands how small they are under the sky. “Solo me sé esa.” Emma points at Orion’s belt above them.

 

Regina maybe thinks her son will be one to look at the stars where she’d been one to look where her feet were planted, always wondering which path to take. If she had spent more time looking up perhaps she could name all the constellations and give them to Emma. She can remember the words printed in her old textbooks, how she had memorized most of them and forgotten them after a fifth grade quiz. The heroes are the easiest to remember, they always are.

 

“Perseus,” Regina points at the stars she never thought looked much like anything. “He’s from an old story.”

 

“What he do?”

 

“He cut a monster’s head off.”

 

“That’s yours then.” Emma is still whispering and she says it without a doubt, without shame. It doesn’t sound like she means Regina Mills from her son’s stories, it sounds like she means her. Regina Mills who barely knows what to do, Regina Mills who can’t stop time. She won’t say that the name feels too big on her but that it might just fit Emma.

 

Too overwhelmed to find the right words she takes her hand, here in the quiet of the desert. Regina’s fingers laced with hers feels like the always do, like they’re holding each other to where they need to be. But there isn’t the danger of slipping away on this roof, nothing and no one to tear them apart out here. That in itself feels more dangerous than anything else, this closeness that has nothing to with survival. This thing that can’t be excused as practical or necessary like sharing a bed, this that feels bigger than holding Emma in her arms. Regina can’t make sense of it, another piece with no clear place but one she knows belongs here. Emma tugs her closer until Regina’s head is on her shoulder.

 

“Which one’s mine, you think?”

 

“Andromeda.” Regina doesn’t have to show her which one she means.

 

* * *

 

Regina sits up in bed before sunrise, she winces from the pain in her lower and she runs to the bathroom before what she feels coming stains the bed red. At least her body always gives her some sort of warning she reasons with the beginnings of a headache on the toilet. It’s barely morning on Monday and she’s bleeding.  As if she needed reminders that her body is a clock and that this, ironically, is a sign of things being late. With her sight still adjusting to the yellow bathroom light she reaches under the sink for a pad and before heading back to bed for whatever time she has left. Emma shuffles closer when she slides under the thin cotton sheet, her half-asleep way of saying she knows Regina is back. She wishes they could stay in bed today but they can’t afford the luxury beyond a couple of minutes. Emma moves to lie on her stomach, her arm draping across her womb, the surest sign that she’s asleep. The weight is welcome, like it’s pushing down on the pain that’s spreading throughout. It’s how she manages to close her eyes again and take whatever is left of her sleep.

 

She’s irrationally angry in the heat of the kitchen, the heat that had felt like refuge two days ago. Regina knows that she shouldn’t be holding onto it like a life-line, not use it as antidote to all the pain that’s shooting up her spine. So the knife might fall harder on the chicken, the spatula might almost spark against the grill but it’s something. Something that keeps on her feet and thinking of the way her body seems to be mocking her and torturing her. Keeping her from seeing mother’s face as she packed away when her toys the morning she had ruined her first set of sheets, not that Regina was allowed to speak of it. Like she wasn’t allowed to tell how many hours a week she spent making her hair straight or to say her full name. Funny, Regina thinks bitterly, how none of that matters in this grease spoon. When her frizzes with the steam and hot oil, when her name is Reina and there’s the stickiness between her legs.

 

“You OK, mama?” Rubí says sliding up to the kitchen window.

 

“I’m fine.” She snaps and remembers that she isn’t supposed to bite the hand that feeds her. “It’s the Monday blues, that’s all.”

 

“I hear that.  I think I’m still riding yesterday’s hangover too.” Her fingers tap on the metal on the counter. “You and Emma should come out next time. Sure, Dorothy is just stealing from her aunt’s hooch but it’s something.”

 

Regina has to catch her breath because of how natural it sounds coming from her, how it sounds like they have a life here. How one of them comes with the other. It makes her feel faint, the possibility of of it.

 

“Perhaps. I’ll ask her.”

 

“Right, ace.” She shifts her weight and cocks her head to the side. “Bastard Billy’s back and he wants t-bone and eggs over easy. It’d be OK if his steak hit the floor before it hit the grill.”

 

“Bye, Rubí.” Regina says quirking an eyebrow.

 

“Ay, como que si no lo hubieras pensado.”  

She doesn’t drop meat on the floor and doesn’t do much but wish the day were over. Or at the very least lunch, the hot metal pillar holding up the roof outside should feel good on her back. Regina is thinking of the drugstore and chocolate that’s not really chocolate and chamomile tea, and the hot water she sorely misses when the backdoor opens. Her hand moves to grab the nearest knife before she faces the intruder and sees that it’s just Audrey. Standing there in ripped overalls over a tank top that used to be white.

 

“Hey, hey. Easy, Reina.” Audrey is only half kidding speaking to her like she would to a horse.

 

She puts down the knife, bracing herself against the counter.

 

“Rubí isn’t here, I suggest you go upfront to look for her.” Regina says knowing that her dislike for her is in no way masked. However unwarranted it may be.

 

“I know that, came in here to talk to ya.” She removes the baseball cap and wrings it in her hands. Her hair is flat with sweat and held together in a loose bun.

 

“Oh? What about?” Regina grips her apron as her jaw tightens.

 

“It’s about Emma,” Audrey looks straight at her like she’s about to blame her for something. “She’d probably kick my ass if she knew I was talking to you. Don’t think she knows I know, girl thinks she has me fooled.”

 

“What is it, Audrey?” She spits out losing any shred of patience she had left.

 

“She ain’t right. Thrown up twice today. Wouldn’t be here right now but thing is it’s not the first time.”

 

“How long has this been going on?” Regina asks her not wanting to betray that she hadn’t know about this, that Emma had been hiding it from her. Or maybe she’d been too self absorbed to notice.

 

“Don’t know, week or two.” She shrugs and returns the cap to her head to signal that the conversation is over. “Figured you should take her home or something. She’s looking pretty green.”

 

“Audrey, wait.” Regina says watching her push the door open.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Thank you...for telling me.”

 

“No problem. Knew she wouldn’t, so yeah. It’s OK.” She says

 

Regina turns around to find Mrs. Lucas standing by the window where Rubí had been earlier.

 

“Go, you’ll burn all the food until you know what’s wrong,” She sighs in a way that seems almost fond of Regina. “Day’s slow anyway.”

 

She nods and realizes her hands are shaking when undoes her apron and puts it aside. It’s like Regina can’t decide if she’s angry or concerned and she’s feeling sick herself.

 

Emma is with her head between her legs sitting on an old car seat when she finds her.

 

“Get up, we’re going home.” Regina says tapping her tennis shoes with her own.

 

“Regina?” She asks lifting her head to look at her. Seeing  her sunken eyes and colorless lips she decides she can’t possibly be angry. So she puts up a hand on Emma’s shoulder and rubs the bare and cold skin of it with her thumb.

 

“We’re off the hook for today.”

 

Emma nods knowing there is no use trying to fight her on this. She wipes her hands on her overalls and gets to her feet. Regina’s hands go to steady her, fearing she’s not strong enough.

 

“I’m gonna kill Ramírez for telling you.” She says with a smile that’s weak enough to scare her

 

“Idiot, you’re lucky I don’t kill _you_.” Regina admonishes her leading them out of the grease and oil polluted air and out into the Sun.

 

Regina insists Emma waits for her sitting down under an AC vent in the drugstore and she looks too relieved. She walks the aisles with a basket ignoring how much she still aches and grabs everything that might help an upset stomach. Ginger ale, saltines, mints. Regina is trying to decide which stomach medication is better, orange or green, when her eyes land on home-pregnancy tests. She almost drops her basket when she thinks _tal vez_ and that it can’t be. It just can’t be. Even if it sounds impossible, Regina grabs the second most expensive test and hurries to the checkout counter. She doesn’t even care about the look she gets from the cashier.

 

The box feels like it’s burning a hole through the paper bag it’s in, Regina thinks it might melt the kitchen table once they get home. She opens a can of ginger ale for Emma to drink when she comes back from brushing her teeth and wonders just how in the ever loving hell she’ll ask her to take the test. It’s best to not say what it’s testing, there is no use in alarming Emma. Or _accusing her_ the same ugly voice that first spoke to Audrey today says.

 

“You want me to what?” Emma furrows her brows as she sets down the empty can on the table.

 

“You heard me, Swan.” She hides her mortification behind the commanding tone her voice takes. Regina hands her the stick and keeping its box away from Emma’s eyes.

 

“What’s this for again?”

 

“It’s a simple test, hopefully it’ll tell us why you’re sick.”

 

Emma looks skeptical but still heads back into the bathroom.

 

“Ya terminé, so you can come in!” She yells from behind the closed door.

 

Regina finds her sitting on a closed toilet lid holding the pregnancy test away from her, not knowing what it is. With tired eyes Emma watches her pace back and forth for five minutes until Regina finally settles on sitting on the bathroom floor, the old yellow tile hard on her body. She lets her forehead hit her bent knees and feels Emma dropping next to her.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She mumbles not raising her head.

 

“Don’t know. Didn’t want you to worry, I guess.” Emma sounds exhausted. “Supposed to protect you, not you…”

 

“That’s not how this works. Not anymore.” She looks up to find her eyes soft, not quite on the verge of tears.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Don’t be, just don’t try to take it all on yourself.”  Regina is aware that her voice is low and gentle like maybe daddy’s had been.

 

“OK.” Emma bumps her shoulder with hers.”Hey, I think it’s done.” She hands her the stick for her to see.

 

One red line is showing, thick and clear. Suddenly every single piece of their future is laid out as clear as a cyborg’s brain on a kitchen. The extra piece, too large and foreign, has been cast out in a single moment. On a bathroom floor that is too cold and hard, at barely noon on Monday. Regina can’t help the tears and the sobs that come out or the way her head finds Emma’s shoulder.

 

“Regina..qué, what’s going on?” Emma moves away, forcing Regina to look at her.

 

Regina tries to clear her voice because this isn’t easy, turning someone’s world’s upside down never is. She has a newfound respect for Sergeant Swan on the night they first met. “You’re pregnant.”

Emma eyes grow wide, her fingers look like trying to dig onto the floor like dirt. She’s never looked more like a girl than in this moment, with filthy denim and loose blonde hair on her shoulders. Her arms hug her abdomen and she begins shaking her head.

 

“No...it’s not. I..yo...it. No puede ser.” She says more to herself than anything else. “You’re wrong.” Her eyes are narrow, like she’s determined to force things to make sense.

 

“I’m not, Emma…” Regina can’t even lie to say that she wishes she weren’t, even if Emma could use it right now. “You’re pregnant.” She repeats hoping it’ll get through this time.

 

“What the fuck is this supposed to mean?” Her cheeks are wet and her voice is brittle. “Regina, I’m so tired.”

 

“I know.” She takes a deep breath, trying to keep her own words for collapsing as they go along. Because this should all feel impossible, but it just feels right. “I think that this means...I think you’re Henry’s mother.”

 

“No, you’re his mother.” Her hand reaches up to wipe her eyes. “I knew your name before I learned how to shoot. That photo you gave me? He carried it in his front pocket. You.” It pours out from her like water. “I can’t be a mother. Not..not his.”

 

“And you think I can?” Regina asks quietly.

 

“We already know you can.”

 

“Those stories haven’t happened, that isn’t me,” She feels her chest becoming smaller and smaller as she breaks. “I’m not who Henry says I am. Todavía no.”

 

“Can’t even be sure that...it’s him.” Emma’s hand returns to her womb, making this real. “But... if it is... he’s not your son, he’s mine.” She sounds defeated, like the other shoe had finally dropped. Regina knows what the words really mean, knows that Emma had expected to be told to leave. For Regina to one day say she isn’t needed, that the mission is over. To leave her behind in whatever dust she could kick up. This is her way of giving her a choice, of letting her leave if she wants to. Because Henry Mills won’t be born from her.

 

Regina slides closer to her, fingers carefully catching her tears. “He’s my son because I say he is.” Emma sucks in a breath and she can’t think of any other way to say how much she means it than to kiss her. On her chapped lips that taste like toothpaste and ginger, on her cheeks that are rough from the day. “He’s ours.”  

 

Emma looks at her like maybe she had when she first heard her son’s, _their_ son’s name. Terrified of the truth but it only lasts a second or two before she’s smiling not minding the sting of her tears. She leans in to kiss Regina again, saying everything in this third language. It feels like they were both perfectly crafted for each other, each jagged corner, every scarred end. It doesn’t feel like fate, it feels like beating it.

 

“Ours.” Emma echoes her words taking Regina’s hand and placing it on her womb.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)
> 
>  
> 
> I don't know every time I think of Regina's POV I go back to the first time I read Eva Luna and menstruating under the blood of the moon. So this is that and also turned on it's head.


	7. E4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was late! I've also decided that this story should be shorter and that another story should cover the events of T2. Because the tone would be too distinct (as it was kindly pointed out to me in a moment of frustration). Also, have the official playlist for this story. [80static Playlist](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpMg1upld0w&list=PLk_cBaVR-TG-igabF5OvnPzXTLLcuYAXg)

Emma doesn’t remember if the bed had always been felt this soft, this safe. Her throat hurts and her stomach feels empty but she doesn’t want to move to do something about it. Not when Regina is running her fingers through her hair and her cheek is pressed against the flat of her stomach. Closing her eyes Emma thinks of the something that will become life inside of her, something she’d never seen in her time. Where people are lucky to just be born. Feeling Regina breathing under her, how cool the day is she knows how lucky she is. Even if her brain feels broken, even if she feels tears coming again when she thinks of Henry Mills, Emma knows to values it. Suerte, always that. It hadn’t felt like that months ago in the future.

 

“His name was Cassidy. Neal,” Regina breath hitches. “Henry Mi...Henry’s father.” She can’t reconcile his face, older and sunburnt with the red line in the stick on the bathroom floor. Doesn’t see how one can be the other, it still doesn’t feel real.

 

“Emma, you don’t have to…”She says even though knows she must’ve been trying to work it out like tornillos and wires.

 

“I want to. Need to.” She says and is glad she has Regina and the sheets in her grasp, needs to them keep her grounded. To remember she’s here with her and not in her past. Regina rubs circles on her neck and fuck it’s like looking at the green and purple flowers y la sal all over again. “He..uh..was one of those people the resistance first took out workcamps. Don’t really remember.” Emma does remember than he was older than many, and that she should have know. Most people didn’t get that far by fighting.

 

“Did you love him?” Regina’s voice is really quiet, the way it gets when she's scared.

 

“Don’t know,” And that much is true. “He was the first. No one had ever looked at me like that so I thought…”She buries her nose into the fabric of her shirt.

 

“That maybe he did and that you should.”

 

“Yeah, algo así.” If Emma thinks about it too much she might get a headache.

 

“What happened?”

 

“There was a mission. Cassidy was my partner for it,” She feels anger cold and sharp at the pit of her stomach when she remembers getting dressed with him watching. His hands zipping her up, asking if she had all her gear. “Supposed to do recon, easy stuff. But then raiders showed up…”

 

“Oh, Emma..” And the way Regina says her name does it, she’s crying.

 

“El hijueputa ese looked me in the eye and said he couldn’t go back there. And he ran, took the car and left me for the raiders.”

 

“Then Henry got you out.”

 

Emma nods as she remembers how small she felt when he’d hugged her that day. How he had a hand on her head and asked over and over again if she was alright. _“You OK? Segura?”_ How he’d given her something to cover up the code in her arm and taken her out. Her son. Their son.

 

“Yeah, tried to find Cassidy after I got back. To kill him, something. Fuck.” Something scratches the inside of her throat. “I hated him, wanted to tell him that. But I couldn’t because he was dead and I wasn’t allowed to hate him because he got himself killed. But I do, Regina...I do. Puta.”

 

“It’s OK, Emma. You can hate him,” Regina says sitting up and pulling her up with her. Her hands hold her face like she had in the bathroom and Emma can’t stop crying. She folds into her arms, feels her lips pressing against her forehead. “It’s alright, it’s alright.” Emma can barely make out her voice but it’s there and that’s all she needs.

 

They fell asleep she thinks before opening her eyes but Regina is looking at her when she does open them. It’s a lot like waking up with the Sun in her eyes. Her fingers move her hair back from her face and Emma wonders if she can kiss her outside the bathroom. If it wasn’t pity, something they do in this time that could be hers when they don’t know what to say. But then Regina smiles like she had that Sunday in the water _._ Idiot, yeah, that’s the right word for her. Maybe Hernández would’ve said pendeja laughing at her, she shakes her head which makes Regina move away her hand. Emma catches it and lets it fall on her neck. It comes easy, like turning her body away from the sink to taste from a spoon. Easy like dozing off to her voice talking about stars. Kissing Regina is the easiest thing she’s done. Labios suaves, nothing like hers. It’s slow and theirs, theirs. It’s like Emma can’t think but it’s all clear, makes sense that time would tear itself apart for this. For how Regina gasps when her teeth graze her lips and how Emma’s whole skin is warm. This makes sense, for the first time since she scraped her knuckles when she fell into this time things make fucking sense.

 

“I thought I’d lose you,” Regina says out of breath with her voice shaky. “I was fighting it any way I could.”

 

“You thought...me?” Emma asks her sinking into her touch. Regina Mills thought she’d lose her, she didn’t want to. “ _That was the thing with mom, always fought for what was important.”_ She’d been holding on to her. To Emma left outside a bunker, always an afterthought.Regina’s eyes narrow and her lips become one tight line looking at her, like she’s mad Emma would question that. “Didn’t think I mattered.” She hears herself saying.

 

“Mierda Emma, of course you matter.” Regina’s are wet around the corners and her voice breaks. “You always have.”

 

“Oh.” Is all she thinks to say before Regina kisses her again, so that she gets it. Really gets it.

 

“Yes?” Her thumbs are rubbing her chin and the question doesn’t sound like a question at all.

 

“Yeah.” Emma knows she’s smiling because Regina is.

* * *

 

She hates this place, Emma decides after the first five minutes of sitting here. It has white walls, white floors and white light. No windows, too many doors that lead nowhere. Besides the fact that they would’ve still been at the house on a regular day, Regina mumbling something in her sleep and Emma stealing the covers for herself. Instead she’s yawning and Regina is pretending she’s not at this doctor place. It’s easier to start thinking in steps, Regina had decided sounding more sure about it than Emma feels. It was her way of saying that they’ll figure it out as they go, it’s the best they can hope for. This place is the first step.

 

“Remember, you’re me,” Regina whispers putting her hand over the knees that’s bouncing up and down.  Emma laughs feeling her eyes sticky at the ends. “In name at least.” It’s the only way they’ll get a doctor to see someone who doesn’t exist in this time.

 

“Yeah, got it.” It’s so quiet here that she can hear the clock ticking. “Do I...tengo que ir sola?”

 

“Do you want me to come with you?” She makes it sound like Emma isn’t scared of it, like this more for her than for Emma.

 

She nods and resists the urge to kiss her because they’re not at the house and somehow that’s dangerous. Emma hadn’t understood and hadn’t gotten more than a sigh from Regina when she’d asked.

 

“Regina Mills?” A woman in white asks without looking up from a hard piece of plastic

 

Regina looks up but it’s Emma who stands up first.

 

“Yeah, that’s me.” She clears her throat thinking it might make things easier.

 

Regina follows behind and squeezes her hand just before letting it go. She’d tried to explain it all to her last night con ojos entreabiertos. Something about needles, blood and tests. She hadn’t caught most of it. No one but machines test anyone in the future. But Emma hadn’t told her that, no use in her knowing. The room where they take them to is smaller and colder, something like a bed and a chair in the middle. One door. She looks back at Regina and she just nods. It’s OK, it’s alright.

 

“I’m going to need you to undress and put this on,” The woman tells her handing something pink. “You can get changed behind that shade over there.”

 

Emma nods pretending she understands more than she does. The air in the room make every hair stand up and the floor is too cold. Even through her socks she can feel it. It smells of something and she thinks she might be sick.She clenches her stomach and wonder if that’s bad for...it passes when she slides on the pink shapeless piece of fabric the woman gave her. Emma hopes it’s the right way on, with her ass hanging out. It makes no sense either way, she decides. She almost slips when she goes back to the woman.

 

“Socks off too, please. I need to weigh you.” She tells her and Emma catches Regina rolling and sighing enough to laugh under her breath.

 

Emma takes them off and rolls them into a ball before tossing them to where the rest of her clothes are. She steps on black scale and watches the woman readjust the scales. She remembers something like this from the future, used it to measure scrap metal and munitions.

 

“Hmm.” She says writing down her weight.

 

“What is it?” Regina asks from behind them.

 

“Nothing.” And it sounds like something. “The doctor will say what’s what.”

 

“What’s that suppos…”

 

“OK. Now for your blood sample.” She cuts Regina off and Emma doesn’t have to look to know she’s burning holes into the woman’s head.

 

Emma had never seen her blood like this, all contained in plastic. Running through a tube and ending up looking so..together. Not running down her knee or going everywhere on her gear. She liked that better and she breathes out when the needle is out and she’s holding her arm up. Next, without really understanding she’s peeing into a cup in a half-light washroom. She wishes she’d listened to Regina last night instead of thinking about lips and the way that new soap smells. There’s nothing more than she wants than their bed right now. Maybe it was the blood, maybe it’s the stupid way fabric hangs off her but Emma just wants to go.

 

Her stomach drops when the woman says “The doctor will be right with you.”

 

“You’re almost done.” Regina runs her hand through Emma’s hair as soon as the door closes, like she knows how much she’d needed it.

 

The door opens and she snatches her hand away. It burns just a little Regina putting it on her hip instead, standing with her shoulders straight and her eyes a little harder. Emma wonders if she’ll ever really get how this time works. It’s a man walking in this time, with a white coat on and something around his neck. He isn’t even looking at them.

 

“Right, Miss Mills. We won’t be getting your test results til later today.” He looks at Emma and she really does think she’ll be sick. His hands are on her face and throat, on her fingernails.It takes every ounce of self-control not to punch him. Cerote.“ But you’re somewhat underweight and discolored. It’s very likely you’re anemic, I’ll prescribe some iron supplements and some folic acid when we’re done.” She didn’t get any of that and Emma looks at Regina knowing she did.

 

“She’s been having a lot of morning sickness. Is that normal?” Her hand is still on her hip and not for the first time sees Regina Mills. Understands how Henry Mills really is her son when her voice gets stronger than Emma feels.

 

“And you are?” He asks with his eyebrows meeting in the middle.

 

“I wanted her here.” Emma says through her teeth because he doesn’t get to know.

 

“Right, OK.” She’s glad he seems confused. Good, at least she isn’t the only one now. “Morning sickness is normal. A change in diet might help reduce it. When did you last menstruate?”

 

“I...I..”Emma had never really kept count of how many times she bled. It didn’t happen too often but when it did it was barely red. Not counting that was years into the future. “Not really sure.”

 

“I recommend we do an ultrasound to see how far along you are,” He’s judging her, Emma can tell by how clears his throat and licks his lips. “And check for any abnormalities.”

 

Emma wants to put her jeans back and walk out because she doesn’t know what the fuck anything he’s saying means. Because it doesn’t even matter, she remembers their son. He’d saved her life more than once, she’d saved his a couple of times. He talks like Regina and his hairs is just as black as hers. It dawns on her that she’s supposed to have an answer to give him because he thinks she’s Regina Mills. Emma feels Regina’s hand on her shoulder, reminding her that she’s here, nudging her in the right direction.

 

“Est...alright.” She says swallowing back every instinct to run.

 

He’s still not looking at them. Not even when he lifts the pink off her and taps something into a machine next to her. A machine and she tries, Emma really tries to think it’s fine. It’s fine until something cold falls on her belly and she flinches. Before she knows it she grabs him by the wrist to stop whatever he’s doing.

 

“Shouldn’t that have been warmed?” Regina says prying her fingers away from his wrist. He looks at her and then at Emma in shock. “People might react badly, you know.”

 

“It’s gel,” He replies looking back at the machine. “Nothing to get worked up about. And if the nurse didn’t think to warm it then there’s nothing I can do.”

 

He presses something against her skin, it’s not painful but she doesn’t want to think what in the future feels like this. This is sticky and cold, this thing that’s supposed to read her like a code. Ganas de llorar tenés, Hernández who now sounds like Audrey in her head would say. Just when she thinks her eyes and throat will give out Regina’s hand is on hers.

 

“Look. That’s him.” She says like she’s picking up her pieces pointing towards the machine.

 

Emma turns to look at it, it’s all black and barely some white in the screen. She thinks she can make out something like a head, and fuck it’s real. Real like Henry Mills and his operations in her past, real like she and Regina are.

 

“Actually we can’t yet say that it’s a boy. You’re only fourteen weeks along.”

 

“Is he…?” Emma asks knowing that he’ll grow up strong. Fuerte. But she has to know that the black and white there is good and healthy, that the image she can barely understand will be the man who believed in her just as hard as he did his mother.

 

“ _It_ looks healthy. Nothing to worry about.”

 

“Está hermoso.” Regina holds her name but Emma can feel it in the way she squeezes her hand.

 

She sucks in a breath because the more she looks at the fuzzy image the more she thinks it right. He’s beautiful.

 

* * *

 

 

Mornings are different now. They’re up earlier, sometimes it’s still dark. Takes them just as long to get of bed, Emma’s arm still goes over Regina’s stomach. Regina half complains that it’s too early and presses a kiss to the top of her head. Mornings are better now. Now that Emma can kiss her neck before she opens her eyes. Breakfast takes longer, she’s hungrier and it works because Regina insists she eats more. Mornings are better now she can see Regina smiling before drinking her coffee. Now that this is theirs.

 

Today Regina forgot to clear away her scribbles and the tools she takes from her and Emma can see how she’s recorded everything. Torn it apart to have it make sense and then put it back together. Emma can see in all this that there is more than one way to prepare for what could come. She just wishes it didn’t make her skin crawl, tries not to think of red eyes, broken glass and too much red on concrete. Can’t ever bear to touch any of it and instead opens el refri to check for juice instead. By the time she’s wiping her mouth with the back of her hand it’s all gone back to the broom closet she never opens.

 

“I think there’s a university campus a couple hours away,” Regina tells her after swallowing her first bite of toast. “I was thinking we could go over the weekend.”

 

“What’s there?”

 

“They have a lab with computers…”

 

“Machines.”

 

She sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “Yes, machines. I’ve learned all I can from the head,” Regina doesn’t flinch when she mentions it and Emma wonders just how the fuck she can do that. How she can be so close to something that will always try and kill her. “I need equipment to see how it works.”

 

“Not safe, Regina. You don’t know Skynet, no sabés what it can do. What…”

 

“No, but that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Better ways to stop it. We won’t always be so lucky.” The words are quick to come out. Her chin is up and her eyes are set on hers.

 

It’s always been there for them. She doesn’t know how much is chance and how much is fate, Emma almost wants to argue say that it will always work out. But she can’t lie, she can’t say those words and be from where she comes from. So she nods seeing Regina’s expression relax. It’s Monday morning and there’s still time until she comes face to face with green numbers and black screens again. Faltan días and she can pretend it’s not going to happen soon. Days that will be good, she’ll be counting the hours of each one.

 

It’s the afternoon and her nails are covered in oil. The damn engine is stubborn and she bangs her head on the open hood. Por la gran puta. There go minutes of today that she’ll spend rubbing her head. She groans as she hears the metal of her tool clink on the concrete.

 

“You OK, Swan?” Audrey asks from the car next to hers.

 

“Yeah, yeah.”

 

“You’ve been tearing that thing apart when I know it doesn’t need that much work.” Audrey isn’t looking at  her, makes it sound like she’s looking at parts that need fixing. “Everything alright with you and Reina?”

 

“Why?” Emma asks wiping her hands on the rag sticking out from her pocket. She doesn’t like questions about Regina. Doesn’t matter who’s asking. All she sees is roads that never end and Regina’s head against the car window. No sleep and hunger.

 

“No reason. You seem tense or somethin’. Thought maybe you had a fight.” Audrey shrugs.

 

“Everything’s good.” It’s not a lie, it isn’t. Right now with her stomach full, after lunch in the heat and swallowing the vitamins and whatever else she can’t remember, everything is good. Everything is good because Regina had kept her hand on hers after she put her empty plate aside. It’ll still be good Saturday night, Sunday morning.

 

“If you wanna to talk…”

 

“I know.”  Emma says sitting down on the dirty car seat at the end of the work table. Her jeans feel a little tighter and her hand goes to below su ombligo out of habit now more than anything.

 

“You lookin’ better these days though.” She tells with a laugh. “Was about to blame abue’s cooking, ya know?”

 

“Don’t tell her that.” She can’t help but snort. “Or Reg..Reina.”

 

“Do I look like I have a death wish, Swan?”

 

She smiles because yeah everything’s good.

 

The Sun is almost gone again, she likes the day this way. Darker colors, sticking her hands in her pockets and kicking pebbles waiting for Regina to be done. Today she leans against the wall, feeling heavier in her shoes and looks at the empty road. Maybe she’s thinking about nothing and everything because Emma almost misses the whine next to her. Looking up to her are one blue and one yellow eye. A big brown dog, wagging its tail. It looks nothing like Lucha, the one Henry gave her a week after he’d met her. _“She’ll keep you safe. Trained her myself.”_ Scratching between the dog’s eyes and watching it closer her eyes to it she wonders if she’s the one who teaches Henry how whistle call dogs, get them to obey no one else.

 

“Who’s this?” Regina asks snapping out of her thoughts.

 

“Don’t know.” The dog wags its tail at Regina, like it’s trying to talk her into something.

 

“Maybe Mrs. Lucas or Rubí have been feeding it scraps. Not that I’ve seen them do it.” Her hand is on Emma’s elbow for a second, safe. Away from her fingers. She reaches into her bag to find a bland cookie that’s good for Emma’s stomach and breaks in two. The dog takes it like Emma would.

 

“Hey, that’s mine!” She complains knowing that what she wants is to kiss her.

 

“Avorazada.” Regina rolls her eyes and hands her the other half. “Let’s go.”

 

The dog follows them all the way back to the house, sometimes barking at passing cars. Like it’s trying to prove its worth to them. Once they’ve reached the white of the house and red dirt Emma crouches down to scratch under its jaw and gazes at Regina who has her arms crossed, lips pressed together.

 

“We might as well keep it. It came this far.” She says walking inside.

 

“It’s a she!” Emma shouts after her and hears her laugh.

 

Dinner is different now too, with the dog watching them both eat. Her black nose twitches like Lucha’s did whenever Emma ate by the fire with Henry. She seems to understand that Regina is the one with the food. Stares and whines enough to make her stand up with an eyeroll Emma will never forget.

 

“She’s worse than you.” Regina says setting a plate full of chicken scraps and rice on the floor after dinner. “I think we should give her a name.”

 

Emma looks at her, with her tail up in air and the color of her hair. Dulce, like the chocolate she breaks into pieces after dinner.

 

“Choco?”

 

“Choco. Choco.” Regina tries it on, see if it sounds good. “Choco.” Her voice turns higher like she’d never heard it before and the dog tilts its head up at her. “It seems like that’s the one.”

 

Choco follows them into their room, settles at the foot of the bed looking like she belongs. Emma supposes she does. She hasn’t trained her yet but she’ll bark out out of instinct if metal approaches. If it weren’t for the sheets covering her legs and Regina’s skin brushing against her she’d think it’s her past. Future. Still gets headaches from thinking about time, her time. The time that maybe wasn’t hers to begin with but this one could be. With dog snores and mumbles she sometimes understands Emma thinks it has to be. It has to be.

 

Emma is still counting down the hours until it’s Saturday, counts the hours while everything is still good. Counts down the hours her clothes feel smaller around her waist and stick to her ass. Counts down the hours when Choco waits with her head between her paws watching her work. She knows only minutes go by when Audrey says “You got your own guard dog now. Guess took Reina long enough”, she spends seconds trying to figure out what that means. Maybe Emma stops counting when Regina wipes the sweat from her forehead and tries to smooth down that bit of hair she calls necio on her temples. But then Regina’s fingers fit with hers when she’s helping her off the ground and Emma knows that when they slip off her grasp she’ll be back to counting. Time always seems to bend, break and even stop because of Regina. Fuck, it’s how she’s suddenly out here sitting in a chair that feels like it might give in the red dirt. Maybe if she blinks twice it looks like something, like Henry will be dusting himself off. Blink again and it looks like Friday night. Emma whistles so that Choco comes back to her and the fire they’ve built. She brushes against Regina’s legs before she settles her head on Emma’s foot.

 

“How did you know how to do that?” Regina asks her tracing a scar on the back of her hand.

 

“Don’t really remember. Was doing it before I knew I was.” She tries to think back of when she first did it. Maybe it was in a tunnel, maybe it was between piles of junk. Only Henry whistling three times and three different dogs rushing to his side feels real.

 

“I guess it’ll come to me like that too.” She says fighting off a yawn, not knowing it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Still doesn’t know when her head falls on Emma’s shoulder.

 

“You don’t know how to..?”

 

“Mother wasn’t big on letting me keep anything I could love,” Emma wonders if this how she sounds to Regina too, how she talks of something ugly without her voice giving. “She allowed a horse because she thought I’d meet the right people.”

 

“Did you?”

 

“No.” Regina laughs quietly. “I’ve only ever met the wrong sorts.” Regina kisses the underside of her jaw and even if she doesn’t understand what she means she can feel it. “Sometimes...no sé, I think maybe you saved me in more than one way.”

 

“Ah, yeah?” Her pulse gets faster like she’d been running for their lives again.

 

“I didn’t know where I was going, I only knew I didn’t like it. Then you came and…”She sighs and her whole neck is warm. “I guess I’m trying to say that I never thanked you.”

 

Emma hums because she can’t think of the words, the right ones. “Pero like you know what’s coming, aren’t you scared?”

 

“All the time, that hasn’t changed.” Regina nails are cool going up her arm. “Are you?”

She should say no, she isn’t scared. Because Emma has seen worse, she comes from a place where there’s no green only dust. Where color comes from wastelands and anything that can kill you. Emma should tell Regina that it’s nothing. But she can’t because she’s terrified, because Regina doesn’t know how to whistle to Choco and Henry does. Because he’s her son because se rie igual que ella. And she doesn’t know, for the first time in this time that has to be hers, what’s coming.

 

“Yeah,” Emma sucks in a breath. “I don’t...I still don’t understand how it’s me. It was always you for him. Especially the small stuff. Baking apples and how much you liked cinnamon.” Emma could never imagine what he meant, never knew what anything looked like. It was lucky just knowing the words back then.

 

Regina moves away from her and her eyes dig into hers and it isn’t fair. Because Emma can’t look away when they do that. And she’s smiling so wide, like everything fell into place for her.

 

“Qué?” She asks because she’s lost again.

 

“Bella, I _hate_ cinnamon,” Regina’s never looked like this before, looking like she’s part of the fire. “It’s what you’ve been putting in your chocolate at the diner.”

 

Mom, mom. Mom with the books, mom with the guns. Mom con el pelo negro, mom with the scars. Mom who sings when she’s happy, mom who lets him walk barefoot on grass. Mom who names him after her father, mom who always wanted a family. _Moms._

 

Emma thinks it’s only hard to kiss Regina when she can’t decide whether to smile or cry, but she does it anyway. Does it for so long that she almost forgot that she’d been counting down the hours. Everything is so good that she wishes she had.

 

* * *

 

It’s hot out in this place, it was a three hour drive. There’s a piece of the machine in Regina’s bag, the brain. That’s what she called it. That thing that fits in the palm of her hand and could never bleed down its skull. Emma shield her eyes from the Sun and watches people come and go in the middle of things. They don’t stick out here, and there’s plenty of places to run and hide. Enough cars to steal. Knowing all this isn’t helping forget that they’re hunting for someone that’ll take them to machines.

 

“So what we looking for?”

 

“Pick someone who looks like they haven’t seen the Sun in a while.”  Regina says through her teeth.

 

“Like him?” Emma points at him with her chin. He looks almost blue, his hair is sticking up like he’d run his fingers through it. There are numbers written on his hands and he doesn’t blink.

 

“Exactly like him.” The smile she has on is dangerous, plastique with a short fuse. “Come on.”

 

Emma rubs the back of her neck as she slides off her seat to follow Regina. He doesn't notice that they're five steps behind him as they go from the Sun to the shade. Not even when all the people are gone and they're inside a building with long hallways. Regina presses herself against the wall when he rounds a corner and a door closes.

 

“We can’t go in right after.” She says. “He can’t notice us. If we’re lucky he’ll actually leave today.”

 

“Today?!” That part she hadn’t mentioned.

 

“Shhhh.”Regina hits her arm. “We’ll be out before you know it.”

 

That’s a lie, Emma knows it’s a lie the moment they open the door and cool air hits them in the face. She shivers and she wishes it was the cold and not the four rows of machines. They’re bigger than what than she remembers. One door, no windows. It might make her sick but she bites down on her lip and sits down next to Regina.

 

“Alright, let’s see what we have to work with,” She say pushing a button. The machine hums, thinking Emma knows that. It’s waking up, with the green against the black of the screen. Some things haven’t changed. “Not as good as I would like but beggars can’t be choosers.” Regina sighs as she removes the brain and an another piece from her bag. She hadn’t seen it before today, Regina must worked on it late at night. It has all the marks of her work, neat and seamless. Almost like a machine had made it. Regina’s fingers work quick, plugging wires into the computer, pressing keys down. Almost like she had missed it. Emma can’t follow anything she’s doing so instead she rubs her arms to keep her skin from hardening. It doesn’t work because a chill as all she feels when Regina docks the brain into her piece and a numbers pop on screen.

 

“What’s it doing?” Emma hears the fear in her voice.

 

“Right now? Not much of anything. It doesn’t have enough power to fully wake up, so to speak.” Regina says almost like she’s not there, looking a lot like when she kneeled next to machine.

 

“And are you gonna give it to it?” Emma taps on her knees thinking maybe she shouldn’t have asked.

 

“Just enough to sort through its files.”  

 

“That’s not, we shouldn’t…”

 

“No, Emma. We need to know what it knows,” She turns to look at her, eyebrows meeting in the middle. “There has to be a way to defeat them.”

 

“There isn’t one,” Emma crosses her arms thinking of all the times they thought they’d won. “We come up with something new, they find a way to beat it. It’s what they do. It’s all they do.”

 

“Maybe you didn’t try everything.” Regina jerks away from her and feeds the machine numbers.

 

She doesn’t say anything back because fuck her lips are still swollen from last night. Can’t even fight it because it could be true, they didn’t try everything. They never had the time to try and understand them, there was only time to make stronger weapons. Chart out new routes, find better tunnels. Emma keeps quiet, shifts in her chair and stares up at the ceiling. Wishing they weren’t here, wishing they were anywhere but here. She closes her eyes for a second, thinks of red dirt and soft sheets. Wonders if they’ll go back today. The second stretches for hours. They’re alone now, no one with pale skin and numbers on it is here.

 

“I’ve figured out,” Regina hand is on her leg, nudging her awake. “How it thinks.”

 

Emma’s eyes sting and she can barely lift her neck from how stiff it is. She doesn’t want to know but Regina’s voice is low like it is in the morning so she asks. “How?”

 

“It categorizes its information. I’m still trying to decipher what these symbols mean exactly, but I’m guessing _these_ are its mission parameters.” She taps the screen, and there are things from the future she doesn’t recognize. Something they should’ve known about

 

“What do we do with those?”

 

“Break them down into parts,” Regina takes a deep breath like she’s been dreading this moment for a long time. “So we can try and alter them.”

 

“For what? What more can do it do? It doesn’t have its body.”

 

“Mhmmm.” She hums like when she doesn’t want to answer, she has it memorized by now. “Just a little more should do it.” Regina says to herself as she keys something in.

 

Everything but the machine’s screen goes dark. More and more things open on it, symbols and ones and zeroes are rush down it.

 

“Kill it!” Emma reaches for its brain and Regina grabs her wrist.

 

“Not yet!”

 

“Regina!”  

 

Then all the rest of the machines are lighting up with the same symbols on their screens. This time it’s Regina reaching for the brain to kill it.

 

“It must have figured out the computers are all connected to each other.” 

 

“Did it get out?”

 

“No. It wouldn’t have gotten much further than this room anyway.” Regina bends over to unplug cables from the back of the machine.

 

“What are you doing?”  Emma gets up and places a hand on her back, feeling how she moves under it. Like that would’ve slowed her down.

 

“Stealing thousands of dollars in equipment.”

 

* * *

 

There is no avoiding that machine, the table sags under it. It’s against a wall, plugged in and just waiting. Emma never sits with her back to it, like it could jump at them if it decided to one day. Es una pendejada she knows, when it’s just a block taking up space. Still, she watches it every morning because she knows Regina has been keying a code into it before she comes to bed. Cursing under her breath and not telling Emma anything about it. Just like she hadn’t told her anything about the head and the brain. Nothing’s really changed but it feels like it’s going to. Like that day when they’d walked into Skynet, when Henry had just known he’d be losing her. The air had felt different, like it had a mind of its own. Emma fears that like that day she won’t be able to see it, piece together until the last moment. Henry’s like Regina like that, walking into a hell only they know.  It’s why her bag is heavier with ammo today.

 

“Ay mierda, I forgot I promised Mrs. Lucas I’d close up today,” Regina says lacing up the shoes that are still as white as the day she got them. “You don’t mind staying a little longer, do you?”

 

“Not if there’s a slice of pay…”

 

“ _Pie_ and I had assumed as much.” Regina kisses her and she knows that it’s coffee on her lips. Before the blue of their toothpaste. “It’ll make the day seem shorter.”

 

Emma takes her hand and presses her lips to the inside of her wrist because Regina’s wrong. The day is going to be long and they don’t get to do this out there. Regina always looks like she’s holding in her smiles, but not right now. When the day doesn’t feel long.

 

Choco barks at them, like she understands time and it matters to her.

 

“I think that means we’re running late.” Regina says walking into the bathroom.

 

“She’s worse than you.” Emma tells her as Choco lays her paws just under her chest, asking for her head to be scratched.

 

“Good!” She replies through the sound of running water.

 

Even running late won’t make the day seem shorter, or the air lighter. It doesn’t make the gun the back of her pants comfortable. She keeps checking the clock on the wall and it’s never the time she wants. If the day could just end, speed up the way last week had. If she could blink, turn seconds into hours and hear Regina humming to herself as steps out of the water. But she can’t, she’s stuck with batteries, grease, tornillos, and smells that have her running to the bathroom to puke. She hates today. The part of her that remembers she was left outside with the rest of the junk, that part of her that makes her wake up in sweats sometimes tells her she’s spoiled. There’s nothing to hate about a day like today. Choco snores next to a battery charger, Regina will open the backdoor with food in an hour or so. But she can’t help it, it’s coming from her gut. The part that reminds her that she’s still a soldier. 

That part of her is relieved when she sees Regina long after the Sun’s set, carrying a pie dish in one hand. Her bag is heavy as she puts it over her shoulder, heavy is good. Heavy means she hadn’t used any of the ammo in there. She smiles for the first time today as she moves closer to Regina, Choco circling her. Good to know she’s not the only happy that they’re going home.

 

“You’re lucky no one touches the sweet potato pie this time a year.” Regina tells her after locking the door.

 

“I don’t understand past people.”

 

“It’s not just you, believe me.” She switches on light bulb and looks out into the road. “Oh for God’s sake, we’re closed. WE’RE CLOSED!” Regina shouts at a woman walking towards them.

 

She’s about Emma’s height, red hair seems to glow like fire in the dark. Skin paler than she’s seen in a great long while, like it’s never been outside. She’s walking like she knows where she’s going, ignoring that there’s nothing to see here but them. Nothing out here but them and Choco begins growling. The hairs on her back are on edge and she’s ready to attack. A machine, it’s here. For Regina again, doesn’t know it also needs her life. She pulls her gun out and shoots as many rounds as she can. It doesn’t slow down, it barely has marks to show for the bullets. The pie plate breaks and Regina’s pulling her away towards the back. Choco stands her ground and keeps barking , like dogs always do.

 

“You need to go!” She says unzipping her bag grabbing the biggest gun in there.

 

“No!” Emma searches for the grenade that should be there, for the shotgun. Anything that won’t be good enough. “We’re both going, OK?!”

 

“It only wants me!” And for the first time, Regina’s too fast for her. Rápida, rápida and just when did she learn? The casings hit the ground and she knows that’s the gun that had almost knocked her to the ground weeks ago.

 

So she gets up even if she knows it’s up to her to keep their son safe, she still leaves her hiding place because the goddamn bullets have stopped raining. Because Choco is whining in a corner. Her knees almost give in, seeing it holding Regina up by the throat with no emotion in those green eyes. Regina holding a clamp to its neck, her feet still kicking. Emma thinks of the last machine, twitching because of the electricity. Regina on bare feet, and realizes what she’d wanted to do. Die trying to stop it if it meant..fuck she doesn’t want to think about it. Emma runs to the charger and cranks it. Its face doesn’t show any sign of it even as Regina falls from its grip. It’s still standing there, with its arm out. Frozen and they don’t know for how long.  She’s on the ground coughing and bats her hand away when Emma tries to help her up.

 

“You never listen to me. Come unscrew this.” Her voice is rough as she fishes a knife from her pocket. Regina cuts into the machine’s head like she’s been practicing. Red flows down the side of its face, past her eye and staining the green of its stolen shirt. “Quickly!”  

 

Emma grabs Audrey’s impact, the one she made her swear never to touch. The metal is gray and new under all the fake blood, under the fake hair and she can see the bolt she’s meant to loosen. It’s done in two seconds, done right when the machine’s eyes light up red under the green.Regina’s fingers are careful opening it up, even they pull out its brain. The machine’s eyes go dark.

 

“Puta, that was close.” She drops the impact to the floor and squeezes Regina’s hand. It’s when she feels the open gash in her hands that she knows she’s hurt. Cuts on her face, neck that will turn dark tomorrow. Hair that’s sticking to the sweat on her forehead. This was too fucking close, she could be dead right now. Dead, Regina Mills gone and taken from them.

 

Regina winces as she puts the brain down on the worktable. And because Emma’s a soldier,because Regina is just like her son, because the air is heavier and because they’ll need to run soon Emma grabs a hammer and moves to smash the thing to pieces.

 

“No! What do you think you’re doing?!” Regina covers it with her hands.

 

“Making sure that thing is gone! Regina, move!”

 

“I didn’t risk my life so that you hammer it down to nothing!” She sticks the brain in her pocket, holding it there with her fist. “Do you know what it can do?!”

 

“I just saw what it can do! It’s only good for killing! Sabes la suerte que tenés?!”

 

“Yes, I _fucking_ do! One day they’re going to actually succeed and kill us if we don’t do something about it!”

 

“Qué, what...are we supposed to do then?”  Emma sees the strain in her neck. In her forehead, just how much she means it.

 

“We take it and wipe the brain. Reprogram it, make it fight for us.”

 

“ What?! Listen to what you’re saying!”

 

“I am! Are you?! We need all the firepower we can get!” Regina stands straighter, even if her breathing is uneven. Even if she it sounds like metal is stuck in her throat,Regina stands like Henry Mills. Sees how big she really is. “It’s not just me we’re trying to protect anymore.”

 

“OK,” Emma says putting the hammer down, hears Choco nails click against the concrete as she comes stand next to her. "OK." 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Im terrible at grim dark apocalyptic shit.


End file.
